YouTube is high on the success of YouTube Shorts, a short-form video offering they introduced in September 2020 to compete with TikTok. In June, Shorts had more than 1.5 billion monthly users. And last month, YouTube announced new monetization opportunities for the format, a move that indicated that it was becoming big business for YouTube and a viable revenue source for creators.
However, reports of users being shown transphobic Shorts are spreading across other social media platforms. YouTube users say transphobic videos are appearing on their feeds among seemingly unrelated content. The largest call out has come from one of the platform’s oldest, most-respected, and prolific creators, Hank Green:
Shorts is the default tab in the YouTube app, which means it’s the first thing you see when you open it. Users have been noting how being confronted with that kind of content makes them feel:
YouTube has historically struggled to moderate hate and misinformation. Recently Jessie Earl, a trans YouTube creator, has been vocal about YouTube flagging a video critiquing anti-trans comments from YouTuber Matt Walsh. Earl argues that Walsh’s videos promote anti-trans rhetoric and have not received similar treatment.
But some users are shocked by just how prevalent transphobic content is on Shorts, and how hard it is to get rid of it. One Redditor claims, « A solid half of the videos recommended to me are intensely transphobic. I hit ‘don’t recommend me this channel,’ but it doesn’t seem to work. »
Like TikTok, the Shorts recommendation algorithm feeds content to the user in an endless scroll. A user might not click on a transphobic long-form YouTube video, but they aren’t given that same choice when spoon-fed a 15-second video in the Shorts tab.
Mashable has reached out to YouTube for comment.
