Pride is upon us, and big companies drape themselves in the rainbow flag. Herein is a brief tale of Youtube trying to have its cake and eat it too.
#Proudtocreate
He looks at it.
Joe: Really, with this?
Intro: Armchair Philosophy
I don’t monetize my Youtube videos. Why would I? I only make a few a year, and my viewership numbers aren’t exactly blowing wind up anybody’s skirt. But other people do. Other creators who aren’t doing this as an expensive hobby rely on ad revenue.
It’s Pride month. And every pride month, we queer folx watch, in dismay, as the very corporations who donate to anti-LGTBQIA causes and politicians dress up their logo in a rainbow flag, putting a fig leaf of support over their decidedly anti-queer crotch, pretending we matter so long as our money spends, all the while holding a boot to our collective neck.
Google is the latest to perpetuate this scam of a tactic, gussying Youtube up like so much lipstick on an entirely transphobic pig with their hand-wavey “support” of Pride with their #ProudToCreate campaign.
Sure. Be queer. Just do it over there. Not over there. Further. *Hand to mouth.* FURTHER!
Okay.
No. Not there either.
A recent Youtube experiment popped up on my twitter feed by @Whatever, a description of who this person is.
Youtube has a policy of demonetizing what they deem to be “controversial” content, and their algorithm seeks out a demonetizes any video with the word transgender in the title.
Often times, this is initially an innocent side-effect of machine learning. You teach an AI to locate hateful content and demonetize it, and a lot of hateful content has trans or transgender in its tits, and your algorithm overshoots and picks on the word writ large.
I’m being charitable to Youtube in even assuming this is the case. Because I have no reason to give the platform any benefit of any doubt, but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume that this initially innocent byproduct of letting their robots do their jobs for them is what happened.
They haven’t fixed it.
They know this is a thing. They haven’t fixed it.
Queer content creators of all stripes have been complaining about this for months.
They haven’t fixed it.
Worse yet, anti-LBGTQUI ads are running ON THOSE DEMONETIZED VIDEOS.
So you can’t be queer on Youtube, but you can damn sure hate on us and hell, we’ll even run that hate on the queer creators’ channels before their demonetized video about transitioning.
Gotta’ protect the kids, right? Gotta’ protect them from… knowing we exist, I guess?
Youtube. Fix your shit. In the meantime, all the rest of us can do is be #ProudToBeDemonetized
