YouTube is allowing right-wing creators with millions of subscribers to misgender and deadname trans people on its platform — and monetizing that content through advertising. YouTube has claimed for years to be committed to protecting trans people from hate speech and harassment on the platform while resisting advocates’ calls to explicitly prohibit intentionally deadnaming or misgendering trans people — forms of harassment that involve using a trans person's former name or incorrect pronouns. Media Matters reviewed the YouTube channels of popular right-wing pundits including The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and Candace Owens and found that they have repeatedly misgendered and deadnamed high-profile trans people, including minors. What’s more, their content misidentifying trans people was frequently monetized, meaning that YouTube and the creators likely profited from this bigotry. Though YouTube has temporarily suspended or demonetized accounts in the past for violating its hate speech and harassment policies by promoting bigotry against LGBTQ people, the platform’s lack of explicit rules around misgendering and deadnaming has left YouTube rife with monetized anti-trans vitriol.
Oh yeah, if there was ever any reason to take their “advertising helps keep YouTube free” shit and tell them to blow it out their ass, it’s the sheer amount of hateful garbage that they let those ads run on.
Just think of all the right wing bullshit and “anti-woke” content creators there are nowadays popping out bullshit. Look at all the YouTubers that have just gone full mask off because they found it’s actually profitable.
Go search for X-Men, and look how many videos have come out in the last week that are nothing but commentary on the news about the non-binary character. Appreciate that that level of content is being produced with every headline. Think about the money being made there, by both youtube, and those content creators.
This is a hate machine that YouTube is directly funding. And until they stop that, they can take their whining about ad blockers and fuck right off.