YouTube's cowardly decision this week to at first take no serious action against a popular gay-baiting, racist video personality, and then belatedly move to "demonetize" his programming, is just the latest example of wildly influential social media and tech companies being pushed around by Republicans. Seemingly guided only by their fear of a conservative backlash as well as their bottom lines, the companies continue to advertise their lack of concern for what they're creating socially and politically in this country. And with a 2020 presidential campaign looming, featuring an incumbent president who thrives on lies and bullying, the fear is that the companies are only going to make things worse in coming months.
Indeed, for Donald Trump to succeed in 2020, it's essential that his loyalists flood social media with false information and concocted "news" stories. Those Trump fans likely cheered when Facebook recently announced that it would not take down a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that was posted, depicting her to be slurring words. The video, widely shared by conservatives, has been viewed millions of times.
YouTube's initial Tuesday announcement that it would allow right-wing commentator Steven Crowder to keep airing his proudly anti-gay, anti-Latino videos certainly made things worse. YouTube completely ignored its own stated anti-harassment policies in order to carve out a space for Crowder's vile commentary. The move also came in the wake of YouTube's inexplicable decision to buy lots of ad time on Laura Ingraham's hateful Fox News show. On Wednesday, YouTube backtracked somewhat on the Crowder controversy.
The issue of the conservative's hate speech came to the forefront when Vox host Carlos Maza detailed Crowder's long history of attacking him. In an edited video compilation that Maza posted, Crowder derided him as a “lispy sprite,” a “little queer,” “Mr. Gay Vox,” “Mr. Lispy queer from Vox,” “an angry little queer,” “gay Mexican,” “gay Latino from Vox,” and more. Maza says the relentless attacks have led to years’ worth of harassment, with Crowder fans bombarding the Vox host with vile text messages and phone calls. Crowder defended the anti-Maza taunts as "friendly ribbing."
Incredibly, YouTube initially agreed.
How do we know that was just the latest in a long string of social media and tech giants bending over backward not to offend right-wing bigots who broadcast their message of hate to millions of people? Because YouTube's hate speech policy page specifically bars "content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups” based on a number of attributes including ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation. Elsewhere, YouTube specifically bans creators from using "racial, ethnic, religious, or other slurs where the primary purpose is to promote hatred," and from promoting "stereotypes that incite or promote hatred based on any of the attributes noted above. This can take the form of speech, text, or imagery promoting these stereotypes or treating them as factual."
After initially reviewing Crowder's deep catalog of bigoted speech, YouTube decided he wasn't in violation of its rules because Crowder was merely expressing his opinion, and not trying to be hateful. YouTube stressed that because Crowder didn't specifically urge his fans to harass Maza, no rules were being broken.
"YouTube is trying to make excuses to avoid enforcing its own policies, because it knows that enforcing them would require them to punish some of their most ‘engaging’ creators," Maza responded. "YouTube doesn’t give a shit about actually stopping harassment, it’s doing damage control so it can keep tricking advertisers into believing that it has the courage to regulate its own platform.”
The next day, YouTube changed course and announced Crowder's programming was a problem and that the social media giant was moving to make sure he could not profit off his clicks.
Again and again, it's become obvious that social media companies like YouTube, which is owned by Google, are intimidated by conservatives into abandoning anything that remotely resembles having core beliefs. Conservative activists complain so loudly and so relentlessly about phantom fouls of "liberal bias" that social media and tech companies think twice about even appearing to offend Republicans. The bullying campaigns are launched via congressional hearings, presidential tweets, and nonstop attacks from Fox News.
Conservatives understand that social media giants represent the most important outlets in news media today and that they could dominate the landscape for decades to come. So they have adopted the same playbook that they used on newspapers, cable news, and network TV for years, which means lobbing hollow claims of "bias" and striking fear into the executives that run those companies. They know Trump isn't shy about misusing the power of the federal government to retaliate against his enemies.
"For decades, Republicans have bashed the supposedly liberal mainstream media in an effort to work the refs," Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii recently explained. "Now that two-thirds of Americans get their news from social media, Republicans have a new boogeyman to target—big tech."
The implications are staggering. Just look at how Facebook helped Trump get elected. In 2016, after a flimsy press report suggested Facebook editors were "suppressing conservative news," Facebook eliminated human editors, or "news curators," from the news selection process in favor of an algorithm. That move unleashed a tidal wave of fake news stories on Facebook, which boosted Trump's chances. (One "news" story, announcing that Pope Francis had endorsed Trump, was shared nearly 1 million times on Facebook.) Incredibly, company founder Mark Zuckerberg then hired a retired Republican U.S. senator to investigate whether Facebook is guilty of conservative bias. (i.e. Thank you sir, may I have another?)
Trump has shown bullying works because so many institutions are more concerned about their self-preservation than they are with doing the right thing. Social media and tech companies keep proving that point.
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.