Is YouTube Allowing Homophobic Flags to Remain on LGBT Videos?
Ellen Seidler writes, in a piece at AfterEllen.com titled “Homophobic Flagging of Lesbian Content on YouTube Continues,” that “the repeated flagging of LGBT content regardless of its level of sexual explicitness, and YouTube’s tolerance of this flagging, suggests a clear bias.”
While it is the visitors of YouTube who flag videos they feel are inappropriate, YouTube employees decide what happens after that:
Anybody who sees a [YouTube] video he or she doesn’t like can “flag it†for inappropriate content. The offending clip then goes into a queue and is eventually reviewed by a YouTube staff member who makes the determination whether the video should be pulled off the site entirely, whether it should remain flagged because it contains “inappropriate content,†or whether the “flag†itself should be removed.
It’s not hard to spot a trend after looking around for a little while:
A happy scene of two lesbian characters dreaming about raising a child and discovering they are pregnant from If These Walls Could Talk 2 is flagged, but a mildly sexy, heterosexual kiss from the film The Notebook is not.
A promo for South of Nowhere in which Ashley and Spencer almost kiss is flagged, while a near-kiss between two heterosexual characters in The O.C. is not.
AfterEllen.com never received a response to a request for clarification on what criteria YouTube employees use to determine if a flagged video should remain flagged.
I *just* today experienced flagging for the first time when my own blog was filtered (but notice, not yours!) for “gay or lesbian or bisexual interest”. Sheesh. This is what we need — people censoring others on the basis of what *they* think is good or moral.