A group of LGBT video creators is accusing YouTube of discriminating by suppressing its content, restricting its ability to sell advertising and culling its subscribers, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday evening against the video site and its parent, Google.
The suit adds to allegations against the video streaming site — by far the world’s largest, with nearly 2 billion monthly viewers — that it enforces its policies unevenly and gives a pass to producers with large audiences, even when their content is hostile to gay, lesbian or other communities.
The discrimination alleged in the lawsuit is “embedded in the business model” of YouTube, said Peter Obstler, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs and a partner at law firm Browne George Ross. “By controlling an estimated 95 percent of the public video communications that occur in the world, Google and YouTube wield unparalleled power and unfettered discretion to apply viewpoint-based content policies in a way that permits them to pick winners and losers.”
The suit by five LGBT creators, filed in federal court in San Jose, says YouTube deploys “unlawful content regulation, distribution, and monetization practices that stigmatize, restrict, block, demonetize, and financially harm the LGBT Plaintiffs and the greater LGBT Community.”
“Our policies have no notion of sexual orientation or gender identity and our systems do not restrict or demonetize videos based on these factors or the inclusion of terms like ‘gay’ or ‘transgender,’ ” YouTube spokesman Alex Joseph said in an email. He added that YouTube quickly removes content deemed to include hate speech and terminates accounts that repeatedly run afoul of its policies.
As the leading video platform, YouTube wields tremendous power to make or break creators, who have few other options to turn to. It can pull levers to promote content it favors or to bury videos it seems less desirable. And because the software running YouTube is kept secret, creators are often left guessing when their content is suppressed.
The LGBT creators allege YouTube’s software algorithms, as well as its human reviewers, single out and remove content that features words common in the LGBT community, such as “gay,” “lesbian” or “bisexual” and has caused them to lose advertising revenue.
One of the lawsuit’s allegations, that YouTube has a near monopoly over video content online, wades into a debate heating up in Washington. Antitrust regulators are reviewing whether Google and other tech companies have amassed too much power. The lawsuit alleges that it has.
According to the suit, Google “used their monopoly power over content regulation to selectively apply their rules and restrictions in a manner that allowed them to gain an unfair advantage to profit from their own content to the detriment of its consumers.”
The Washington Post reported earlier this month that moderators for YouTube are trained to treat the most popular video producers differently than others by, for instance, allowing hateful speech to remain on the site while enforcing their policies more stringently against creators with fewer followers. YouTube denied the claims.
YouTube was buffeted by allegations in June that it failed to act against a popular video creator who repeatedly mocked a journalist for being openly gay and of Mexican descent.
Bria Kam and Chrissy Chambers, whose BriaAndChrissy channel has about 850,000 subscribers, allege that YouTube’s enforcement against their channel reduced their monthly revenue to around $500 from $3,500.
However, according to the lawsuit, YouTube routinely restricts content that is allowable by, among other things, labeling videos aimed at LGBT communities for restricted audiences only or altering thumbnail previews of the videos that serve as enticements for potential viewers.
