Look, sometimes murders of crows will blacken the sky at your coming and ravening wolves are gonna follow in your wake, and you’re just gonna have to deal with that, and everybody else in the Costco is just gonna have to deal too
YouTube admitted Tuesday that videos posted by a notoriously
homophobic star violated its policy against “hurtful” language. But it
said it wouldn’t be removing them, instead carving a policy exception
for a prominent conservative voice.
“Every single video has included repeated, overt attacks on my sexual
orientation and ethnicity,” Maza wrote on Twitter. “These videos get
millions of views on YouTube. Every time one gets posted, I wake up to a
wall of homophobic/racist abuse on Instagram and Twitter. … This has
been going on for years, and I’ve tried to flag this shit on several
occasions. But YouTube is never going to actually enforce its policies.
Because Crowder has 3 million YouTube subscribers, and enforcing their
rules would get them accused on anti-conservative bias.”
Crowder, who currently touts a “Carlos Maza is a Fag” shirt, is also known for openly racist ethnic stereotypes, posting a video claiming that AIDS is a hoax,
and sundry hooting bigotry along similar lines. After Maza issued his
public complaint, Crowder wrote that he was “used to being smeared by
massive media organizations” and posted a mocking “apology” video
repeating the slurs.
In a series of tweets
responding to Maza late Tuesday evening, an official YouTube account
said the videos had been reviewed, were deemed to contain “hurtful”
material, but would nonetheless stay up.
“We take allegations of harassment very seriously”, the @TeamYouTube account posted.
“While we found language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted
don’t violate our policies. … As an open platform, it’s crucial for
us to allow everyone–from creators to journalists to late-night TV
hosts–to express their opinions w/in the scope of our policies. Opinions
can be deeply offensive, but if they don’t violate our policies,
they’ll remain on our site.”
Users quickly pointed out,
though, that “hurtful” was YouTube’s own term for a category of
unacceptable material, as defined in its policies, and that its stated
policy was that such material would be removed.
It’s no surprise that YouTube tolerates such content in practice,
despite its terms of service. The whirlwind of far-right content there
attracts a fast-growing and lucratively engaged audience.
But it is unusual for YouTube to wrangle its own policies in
public—especially to justify approving a specific user’s language on its
platform while insisting that it does not approve of such content more
generally.
“YouTube doesn’t give a fuck about queer creators,” Maza earlier
wrote, and on Tuesday he added that YouTube had made it “crystal clear”.
“@YouTube has decided that targeted racist and homophobic harassment
does not violate its policies against hate speech or harassment,” he
wrote. “That’s an absolutely batshit policy that gives bigots free
license.”
Just a few weeks ago, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki admitted a corporate obsession with “maximizing usage statistics” to The New York Times
and promised that the company would prioritize things other than growth
and to change its algorithms to stop recommending illegal and
inappropriate material.
Earlier today, the Times published yet another exposé:
YouTube recommending videos of unclothed children to users interested in
such things, an algorothmic “digital playground for pedophiles.”
YouTube’s revenue now exceeds $15 billion annually and is growing at up to 40 percent a year.
Juli Fusina and More 