YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki offered a non-apology to LGBTQ people who have experienced harassment and hate speech on the video-sharing platform in the wake of attention being drawn to Steven Crowder’s hate speech.

Rightwing vlogger Steven Crowder has repeatedly targeted gay latino journalist Carlos Maza of Vox with homophobic hate speech. Maza put together a compilation of some of Crowder’s recent attacks that drew a lot of attention two weeks ago on Twitter:

He also pointed out that Crowder was selling T-shirts that called Maza a “f*g.”

YouTube’s response was to say that Crowder wasn’t violating any of their policies. Crowder was just expressing his opinion, even if his opinion is that Maza is “an angry little queer.”

He also said that the harassment had led to his inboxes being flooded with hateful messages.

YouTube later demonetized Crowder’s account.

Speaking at a conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, CEO Wojcicki apologized for YouTube allowing Crowder’s hate speech on its platform.

“I know that the decisions we made was very hurtful to the LGBTQ community and that wasn’t our intention at all,” she said. “That was not our intention, and we were really sorry about that, and I do want to explain why we made the decision we did.”

She was pushed on the apology by journalist Ina Fried of Axios, who said that it’s strange that Wojcicki is apologizing when she was involved in YouTube’s decision to leave Crowder’s content up and she still says she believes that was the right decision.

“Are you really sorry for anything that happened to the LGBTQ community?” she asked. “Or are you just sorry they were offended?”

“I’m really, personally very sorry,” Wojcicki said, saying again that YouTube’s intent wasn’t to promote hate speech.

She then went hard into some “But I’m an ally!” whining.

“YouTube has always been a home of so many LGBTQ creators, and that’s why it was so emotional. Even though it was a hard decision, it was harder that it came from us — because it was such an important home. And even though we made this decision[…] we have so many people from the LGBTQ community. We’ve always wanted to support the community openly.”

She said that as a corporation YouTube wants “to support this community.”

Wojcicki then implied that the real issue is that YouTube has so much hate speech on it that if they took down Crowder’s videos then they would have to take down a lot of videos.

“It’s just from a policy standpoint we need to be consistent — if we took down that content, there would be so much other content that we need to take down.”

Maza, of course, didn’t like that response.

Others didn’t either.

Readers' Choice

LEAVE A REPLY