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YouTube CEO Apologizes To LGBTQ Community But Defends Company’s Choice On Controversial Channel

This article is more than 4 years old.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said she was sorry that LGBT users were offended by the company’s stance on homophobic comments by conservative personality Steven Crowder, but she defended the company’s decision not to label his videos as harassment.

“I know that the decision that we made was very hurtful to the LGBT community and that was not our intention at all,” Wojcicki said on stage at the Code Conference in Arizona on Monday night. “We are really sorry about that.”

Wojcicki’s comments come roughly a week after Vox journalist Carlos Maza tweeted a video compilation of Crowder making antigay comments about him on his channel, including calling him “lispy queer.” After several days of silence, YouTube said that Crowder did not violate its policies on harassment or hate speech—and then demonetized his channel the following day.

Wojcicki said that she was involved in the decision and that the company looks at the context of a video, whether it involves public figures, and whether it’s “malicious” when deciding whether it is deemed harassment.

“For right or wrong, right now malicious is a very high bar for us,” she said, adding that the company strives to enforce its policies consistently across its platform.

Ultimately, she said, the company made the “right decision.”

Last week YouTube also rolled out new rules around hate speech, including prohibiting videos with supremacist content, and Wojcicki said that even though that announcement was unrelated to the backlash to its response to Crowder’s channel, she thought that the new rules would benefit LGBT people.

In addition to her comments about the Crowder saga, Wojcicki addressed questions about what would happen if regulators forced YouTube to split from parent company Google—“I don’t know,” she said, “we’d figure it out”—and about whether she thinks that YouTube is having a radicalizing effect on politics.

“Our view has been that we are offering a diverse set of content for our users. Users will choose different types of content,” she said. She also cited policy changes that YouTube made in January to prevent its algorithm from recommending what it calls “borderline content” like conspiracy theories.

“We really want to be able to address it, which is why we’ve made the changes that we have made,” she said.

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