I occasionally discuss things going on with LGBTQ+ media and the difficulty of support for it in many places where you would not expect it. Today's post is one of those...
Companies get a lot of good press when they express positive LGBTQ+ slogans and when they have floats in Pride Parades or when they put out feel good images of loving, committed LGBTQ+ people. And you think that means that surely that company wouldn't classify all gay content as "not advertiser friendly" and suppress it from viral lists despite it having more views and more velocity of likes/comments/engagement than other non-LGBTQ+ content with less views, less velocity, less engagement, right?
RIGHT?
Well, you'd be wrong if we're talking about YouTube. Definitely watch this first video by Nerd City. It's brilliant and damning and will give you all the details of what is going on and likely why:
It's always been an open secret that YouTube demonitizes and suppresses LGBTQ+ content. What I mean by demonitize is that those videos are not allowed to have ads placed upon them. Most YouTube creators get the majority of the money to make their videos from Adsense that comes from having those ads at the beginning or somewhere in their videos (you know, the ones you quickly click SKIP on. lol, I do it too).
There has been tons of anecdotal evidence that those channels that produced any kind of LGBTQ+ content would immediately have a black mark or the dreaded Yellow Dollar Sign. It didn't matter if the creator was talking about, for example, support for coming out, videos on safe sex (not sexual content but stuff like condoms, etc.) or discussions of gay marriage and had nothing adult in those topics, more than anything else. It didn't matter. If the words "gay" or "lesbian" or "trans" appeared anywhere, that content was immediately flagged by the AI, demonitized and suppressed from the recommendations. See Rogue Rocket.
But YouTube executives claimed otherwise...
In the above videos, various YouTube officers claimed that there was no list of words that would lead to automatic demonitization, especially for LGBTQ+ content. Cross their hearts and hope to die. But then several YouTube creators decided to test whether the anecdotal experiences were correct or the YoutTube officers were....
Guess what? The YouTube Exes Were Incorrect...
Or were speaking legalese or in a way to obscure the actual truth, which can be summed up by the following simple example:
The words "GAY" and "HOMOSEXUAL" were always demonitized, while the words "STRAIGHT" and "HETEROSEXUAL" were always monetized.
There is literally a list of words these creators managed to test and could say without doubt would lead to demonitization on YouTube and many of them target LGTBQ+ content.
Why Is This Important To You/To Raythe Reign?
It's just a reminder that the fight for acceptance is really hardly over.
I know I am guilty of this, which is a sort of wishful thinking that LGBTQ+ people and content being accepted is the NORM, at least among these companies that tout how LBGTQ+ friendly they appear to be on the surface. Yet the truth is that many of these companies will suppress or outright ban content that should be completely inline with their positive stance on LGBTQ+ content. Yet they do this because they care far more about their bottom line than actually putting their money where their mouth is. Don't want to offend those advertisers that might NOT put those floats in the Pride Parade, right, YouTube?
Kat and I have ample personal experience with advertising Raythe Reign and prejudice. Simply the use of the word "gay" would get our advertisements on Google (who is also owned by the same company as YouTube) classified as "non-family friendly" despite the fact that we restricted our audience to those 25 years or older. It didn't matter. The ad with the word "gay" would not be shown.
We had many people who didn't believe us (despite screen shots where the ad with the word "gay" was not approved while the exact same ad without the word "gay" was). And the reason was that Google was so forward thinking! It was LGBTQ+ friendly! Hadn't we seen all of their advertisements with rainbow flags and the floats????!!!!! We were mistaken!
Except we weren't.
And the creators on YouTube who knew their videos were automatically being suppressed and demonitized because they contained the word "gay" were right, too.
And that we all have to remember that words are cheap in many ways. Actions are what counts.
Are you guys surprised by this? Or is this par for the course in your opinion?