A group of LGBTQI+ YouTubers are suing the video-sharing platform and its parent firm Google over poor moderation of "hate" content and unfairly restricting the videos of LGBTQI+ creators.
According to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, since 2016, YouTube and Google have indulged in "unlawful content regulation, distribution, and monetisation practices that stigmatise, restrict, block, demonetise, and financially harm the LGBTQ Plaintiffs and the greater LGBTQ Community", a report in the CNET on Wednesday.
"They flagged our pride. They did not allow us to buy ads. They restricted us. They demonetized us. And they did not stand up for us," a YouTuber posted in a video to the site to announce the lawsuit, the report added.
The creators include Bria Kam and Chrissy Chambers of BriaAndChrissy, Lindsay Amer, Chris Knight, Celso Dulay, Cameron Stiehl, Amp Somers and Chase Ross.
Chrissy Chambers of BriaAndChrissy is a channel aimed at LGBTQI+ viewers that claimed that YouTube unfairly marked their videos as restricted, thus, limiting who could view them and how much money they could make out of it.
Amer said the video-sharing major did nothing when Nazi trolls flooded her comments section with hate which discouraged parents from letting their kids watch her channel while others claimed YouTube's mysterious moderators targeted videos that included the words "gay", "lesbian", or "bisexual", according to PCMag.
The plaintiffs also shared a video on Somers' channel, "Watts The Safeword", explaining why they decided to take the legal route.
Watch the video below: