YouTube has apologized to its LGBTQ+ creators over featuring anti-queer ads
on many of their videos. Hey you're watching What's Trending, I'm Martine
Beermann make sure to subscribe for more social media and glorious news stories
daily. We reported on this story a month ago. In late May YouTube creators started
seeing anti LGBTQ+ ads on their videos. Most prominent was this ad from the
Alliance Defending Freedom called, "Should the Government Force People to Create
Art That Violates Their Beliefs" [VIDEO] "On that Friday Rob came back I took his hand in
mine and told him I could not do his wedding because of my relationship with
Jesus Christ." The ad centered around a woman who was
being sued by a gay couple for not wanting to make a flower arrangement for
their wedding -- cause she doesn't love love. Perhaps. In our previous video on this
came out literally the same morning that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a
baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple and the news
sucked and the LGBTQ+ community was understandably frustrated but then to
add insult to injury these ads were being played on top of their own YouTube
videos and that is an insult and understandably did not sit well with those creators. [VIDEO] "If I can get
ads on a video talking about LGBT topics then I don't think that a company should
be able to pay for ads against videos while they are also talking about LGBT
topics in a very negative and harmful way. [VIDEO] "Like this is despicable and gross
and disgusting and I hate it so much." This is on top of the fact that LGBTQ+
content is frequently demonetized by YouTube because they're scared that
advertisers won't want their ads to appear on it.
I guess the mere existence of a not insignificant chunk of the US population
is still controversial. YouTube has been feeling the heat and the last day of
Pride Month they posted a series of tweets directed at the LGBTQ+ community.
It's like 4 tweets and 139 words. We're just gonna read those for you -- "It's the
last day of Pride Month and we wanted to reach out to the LGBTQ community. We're
proud of the incredible LGBTQ voices on our platform and the
important role you play in the lives of young people. But we've also had issues
where we let the LGBTQ community down -- inappropriate ads and concerns about how
we're enforcing our monetization policy. We're sorry and we want to do better.
We've taken action on the ads that violate our policies, and we are
tightening our enforcement. And when we hear concerns about how we're
implementing our monetization policy, we take them seriously and make
improvements if needed. It's critical to us that the LGBTQ community feels safe,
welcome, equal and supported on YouTube. Your work is incredibly powerful and we
are committed to working with you to get this right." Yeah cuz the LGBTQ+ community
is like a huge piece of YouTube, like enormous, but there are two critical
parts to this statement. One is that they don't want LGBTQ+ creators to be seeing
offensive ads on their own videos but it's important to note that they say:
"We've taken action on the ads that violate our policies" I guess and it's
not unlikely that like anti LGBTQ+ community ads could pop up where YouTube
is like "oh but it doesn't violate our policies" -- so while they're getting rid of
the ad that basically promotes conversion therapy yeah that's not to
say that we're completely out of the woods just yet.
Creators might still have to make some noise if inappropriate ads crop up. The
second critical point deals with them dollas and monetization. Previously just
having the word lesbian or transgender in the video's title was enough for
YouTube's algorithm to demonetize the video. At What's Trending, we're not
necessarily on an LGBTQ+ community platform, but we will say that some of
our videos were previously demonetized that did have some "key terms" in them and
they've now been re-monetized so I guess we can take that as a good sign for
LGBTQ+ creators out there. There's also like a waring lack of specifics in this
apology so I mean we're gonna tread lightly kind of see where it goes from
here. And it's hard to say for certain if things are actually going to change but
I guess we'll have to see. Many of the most vocal creators on this issue
including, Chase Ross, Gaby Dunn and Ty Turner haven't yet weighed in on
YouTube's apology but here are a sampling of some of the comments on
YouTubes tweet thread -- Megan Brier Gray said: "why did you wait
until the last day of Pride to say all this?
It's a month long. You should have shown your support by rolling out these
changes and updates from the beginning rather than hopping on the bandwagon at
the 11th hour. Shouldn't have happened in the 1st
place. Meme daddy says "convenient that y'all spent the whole month profiting
off of pride and waited to address the issue until the very last day. What do
you guys think? Is this apology genuine or are we going to be seeing a lot more
discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community on YouTube going forward? Let
us know in the comments and for more trends head to What'sTrending.com.