Reply All - #145 Louder

Episode Date: July 11, 2019

Carlos Maza started posting videos on YouTube, and ran afoul of a guy who reminded him of his high school bullies. He asked YouTube to intervene, and then things got extremely complicated. Further Reading: Carlos Maza's video series Strikethrough Mark Bergen on how toxic videos became more common on YouTube Megan Farokhmanesh's article about Google's LGBTQ employees and their reaction to the company's policy decisions Kevin Roose's "The Making of a YouTube Radical" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Alex Goldman. Carlos Maza grew up in Miami. As a kid, he was chubby and shy, and he had a very hard time fitting in at the all-boys Catholic high school that his parents sent him to. What was your, like, first experience being bullied?

It was just, like, a... The high school I went to was, like, really... Had, like, an out-of-control bullying and homophobia problem. It was just a ton of getting called a fag being zip-tied to my chair, People would steal my book bag and like flip it inside out and then draw a penis on it with chalk. And I don't know. Looking back, I'm like, what was I thinking?

But I came out in high school, like in the middle of all that. When you were getting bullied in high school and you would tell the teachers, what would they say? I didn't tell the teachers. Yeah. It was so normal to me that I thought I don't even know what I'd be complaining about. Like the beloved AP English teacher is calling kids faggots in school. Like to some extent, this stuff only exists because the teachers know and tolerate it. They knew it, tolerated it, and it made life for Carlos really hard.

But in his late teens, he found a place that he said was an oasis for him. YouTube. What struck me about it was it was this weird Wild West place where I could see gay people doing. that wasn't just the kind of gay stuff that was acceptable for like primetime corporate TV. Like watching Tyler Oakley and Hannah Hart do weird shit and just kind of be charming and gay while they did it was like really important for me. Carlos grows up and he becomes one of those YouTube people that he admired as a kid. He gets a job with Vox and he starts a YouTube show called Strike Through.

This week, White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee scrambled to explain why Trump abruptly fired FBI director James Comey. There are these bite-sized videos that are like basic explainers about how the media works from a lefty perspective, and they're the kind of videos that Carlos would have loved to have watched growing up. Political journalism looks like this.

On either side, you've got the parties, fighting for the attention of the press. And in the middle, you've got journalists, sorting through what's important and what's just partisan bullshit. This is called gatekeeping. His videos are doing well. People are enjoying them. But Carlos can't shake the feeling that what

he's doing is not completely safe. That just being himself, an out gay man in front of this big group of people, is somehow going to get him in trouble. And then in April of 2017, just two months after he started strikethrough, his fears come true. It starts with this video that he posts, one that felt completely innocuous and uncontroversial when he posted it. It's called comedians have figured out the trick to covering Trump. Look at what happened after Trump tweeted that Obama had wiretaping.

his phones at Trump Tower. Comedians all covered it basically the same way. They said it was baseless, pointed out that it came from a fringe conspiracy theorist. Right-wing radio host and unlicensed gynecologist Mark Levin. And then made clear how bonkers this whole thing was. So the video goes up and very quickly he realizes that another YouTuber has made a response video to it. This very, very popular YouTuber named Stephen Crowder. Vox released this video talking about the

importance and the validity of liberal satire in the time of Donald Trump. Landing on Stephen Crowder's radar is a huge deal. He has millions of subscribers. The alt-right loves him. Conservative politicians love him. And in this video, Stephen and a few of his friends are going through Carlos Mazz's video and dissecting it, rebutting it point by point. Satire is a, it's a rubber-tip sword.

It's a way to make a point without drawing blood. But let's get into their reasoning. and they pivot to something that is oh so expected. How did you feel when you saw it? First, like a deep sense of insecurity about my argument because my biggest fear when I'm writing something is that I miss something really big or that I have a blind spot was like,

Jesus, what did I miss that is so devastating? It really does get to the realm of the absurd. See, you're using an adjective as part of a sentence to describe why that's the case. Just think it's ridiculous? Plus, it's bonkers, is proof that you're being given a free pass as a crappy writer because you're gay. Let's go.

And then when I realized that he was making a lot of comments about my voice and sexual orientation and ethnicity, but my second feeling was just like a tremendous amount of embarrassment. Thank you for letting me know about comments. I don't know what I would do without you, Mr. Lisp be queer from Vox. The way that Crowder Show set up, it's like him and four of his friends in the studio. So it's not just him making jokes. It's like him making homophobic and racist jokes, and then four other grown men laughing at them and jumping in.

And there's just something very, it just feels like a group of bullies is following me around talking shit about me when I'm trying to work. For some reason, Stephen Crowder decides that for the next two years, Carlos is going to be his punching bag. So when Carlos posts a new strike-through episode, often there's a rebuttal from Stephen. That is actually what he would call an outlier. Chip, chip, chip, chip.

That you can eat us one. Like dicks. The rebuttals are Stephen Crowder picking apart Carlos's videos, calling them simplistic or biased, and they're peppered with insults about how Carlos looks, how he talks. And whenever Stephen posts one of these rebuttals, his fans swarm the comments of Carlos' video,

echoing Crowder's talking points and adding their own insults. The gay Vox Sprite is wrong. Now he could be a dranny, Your Honor. Carlos won't acknowledge Stephen Crowder in his videos, which Stephen finds very annoying. Stephen's fans message Carlos incessantly saying, debate Stephen Crowder. And somehow they get a hold of his cell phone number and bombard him with hundreds of text messages, which really freaks Carlos out. If they have my phone number, what do they have my address? What do they have, like, my personal information?

What do they have my family stuff? I don't know how to defend myself at all. Even his hand movement in fast motion is gay. I looked to see if YouTube had any kind of policy that could protect me from this kind of thing. And that's when I realized that YouTube had not just an anti-harassment and anti-bullying policy, but also an anti-hate speech policy, which was news to me. What Stephen Crowder was doing seemed to pretty clearly violate YouTube's rules. Mexican, gay, Latino there at Vox.

The guidelines specifically prohibit, quote, content that is deliberately posted to humiliate someone, or content that makes hurtful and negative personal comments slash videos. about another person. At hominem, yes, but it was an addendum to facts. So Carlos flags Stephen Crowder's videos for harassment, which reports them to YouTube, and

nothing happens. The videos stay up, and Stephen Crowder just keeps making more. Oh, okay, so you really are just named your little queer. All right, next clip. Carlos is beginning to wonder, like, am I overreacting to this? Are the things that Stephen Crowder are saying about me really that bad? So one night,

Carlos sits down on his couch and makes a video for himself. a montage of the worst things that Stephen Crowder said about him. And when he watches it, it's obvious to him that this is not okay. So he takes that video and posts it to Twitter with a statement. These videos make me a target of ridiculous harassment, and it makes life sort of miserable. I waste a lot of time blocking abusive Crowder fanboys, and the shit derails your mental health. That being said, I'm not mad at Crowder.

There will always be monsters in the world. I'm fucking pissed at YouTube, which claims to support its LGBT creators, and has explicit policies against harassment and bullying. The thread hits a nerve. It gets retweeted over 20,000 times. This kind of thing happens online a lot. A platform like YouTube has a ton of rules. Sometimes they get enforced.

Sometimes they don't. But when someone with a big enough following gets harassed and they go public about it, usually it's dealt with pretty quickly. So it seems like what'll happen next is obvious. YouTube will have no choice but to act. Except they don't. They tell Carlos they're looking,

into it, and then they go silent. In the meantime, Stephen Crowder uses Carlos' complaint to cast himself as a martyr. An innocent guy under the thumb of left-wing censorship. In fact, he says the real bully here is Carlos. We reached out to Stephen Crowder for this story, and he wasn't available. But on YouTube, Stephen Crowder made video after video. It's been brought to my attention that many of the comments, videos, and overall tenor and tone of this program have been considered hurtful and offensive to many.

Like this fake apology video, which he says is aimed at everyone he's ever offended, but it's just an opportunity for him to take more shots. I would like to apologize for the use of all of the following racially, sexually, and generally prediditionally charged pejorative nouns and or adjectives that have been used on this program. Homo, colored, wh-queer. In the week after Carlos's complaint, Stephen Crowder gains 100,000 new YouTube subscribers. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson comes to his defense. His stuff isn't for everyone, but so.

If you don't like his videos, watch Colbert. It's a free country where he used to be. The press is working to change that. A few days ago, a writer at Vox.com demanded that YouTube banned Stephen Crowder. Why? For the crime of insulting him. Meanwhile, Stephen Crowder fans are sending Carlos death threats. They're telling him that they know where he lives, where his family lives.

They're doing everything they can to harass him. Someone posted on Reddit a fake account that claims to be me posting amateur gay pornography, obviously not me, but multiple people have sent links to that pornography to my bosses at Vox and CC'd me. My parents are freaked out. I haven't been staying in my apartment for obvious reasons. Do you regret having posted that thread? No. I'm like, I'm like really mad. that it takes this happening to someone

to get a big corporation that claims to give a shit about queer people to even attempt to do the bare minimum to protect us from abuse. Like, it's bullshit. I want them to have to carry this stuff because it is their fault. After the break,

how YouTube's predicament can be traced back to Gangnam style. Yes, gangnam style. Welcome back to the show. So Carlos is angry because he feels like YouTube has become a place where abuse is just a fact life. It's a site that makes life really easy for people like Stephen Crowder at the expense of people like Carlos. And that's not the YouTube he grew up on. It has changed over time. And I wanted to

know how that happened. Right. Well, there's sort of a long story here. Do you want me to walk you through like the history of this thing? Oh my God. There is nothing I would rather have you. Okay. But just to back up, first things first, can you tell me your name and how you'd like to be identified? Yep. Kevin Ruse. I'm a tech columnist for the New York Times. Kevin's written a lot about YouTube, and he told me the story of how this change happened. It's a story about YouTube blindly and ambitiously focusing on one very specific part of the site, a part of the site that on its face doesn't seem like it would have anything to do with Carlos Maza or Stephen Crowder. The recommendations feature. I've been fascinated with YouTube for a long time, and like the recommendations

algorithms specifically. Like, I feel like people think that's a sort of side feature because it appears beside the video, but like it's the product. So if you want to understand what YouTube is, you have to understand, like, how that little box works. That little box, that's the engine that drives YouTube. But that wasn't always the case. In 2006, when Google bought YouTube for over a billion dollars, people were confused about how it was going to make money. Because back then, it was just like a searchable America's funniest home videos. Stuff like Charlie bit my finger.

YouTube was a free website hosting an infinite amount of video, which gets really expensive. So Google decides to start running ads against the videos, which brings in some money, but not enough. Because at the time, the way YouTube worked was that people would go there, they'd watch a video, and they'd leave. So YouTube decides to tweak its algorithm. So YouTube in 2012 decided to make a sort of fundamental change in the way that their algorithms worked. So instead of selecting based on views, it was going to try to optimize watch time. So the overall time that people spent on YouTube would be the thing that factored into the algorithm. So now that YouTube is focusing on how long people stay on their site, they set this ridiculously ambitious goal for themselves.

They want people to spend one billion hours a day on YouTube. That was their North Star for many, many years. They talked about it publicly. All their executives were sort of obsessed with this billion hours number. Every design choice and every engineering. choice that YouTube was making at this point was to try and get people to watch videos longer. And so they tweaked the recommendation algorithm so that it favored longer videos and the people who created them. That's when you saw this birth of these like YouTube commentators who would just go on for half an hour, for 45 minutes, for an hour a day about something in the news as a kind of way to juice their watch time.

The global warming alarmists are out in flock. You've seen these people. Stephen Crowder is actually a great example of this. When he started making videos in 2009, they were mostly like under five minutes, stuff like short sketches where he would play characters. Have you been outside? It's mild and sunny in the middle of winter. Proof of global warming for you. But around 2015, his videos ballooned to like 30, sometimes 60 minutes, and there were a lot more sit-down interviews with people like James O'Keefe and Gavin McGuinness. Ben Shapiro, how are you, sir? I'm doing okay. How are you, dude?

I am doing all right. So I never know how to broach this subject. Around this time, YouTube came up with another innovation to keep people on the site longer, which is after you finished a video, another video recommended you based on what you just watched would start playing automatically. The problem is that the recommendations weren't really that smart. When you finished one video, generally, you would just get recommended a more popular version of the thing you just watched. So if you were watching, like, an obscure synthesizer tutorial. it might push you to a more popular synthesizer tutorial,

and then it might push you to a TED talk about synthesizers, and then it might push you to a performance by... Herbie Hancock. Herbie Hancock. And inside YouTube, people actually refer to this as the Gagnum style problem, because if you just left your YouTube, there was a sort of an internal joke at the company, like if you left your YouTube running,

like it would eventually get to Gagnum's self. because that was like the most popular video on the website. In 2015, YouTube makes another huge change to their algorithm. They're trying to fix the Gangnam style problem, and they do that by tweaking the algorithm in a whole bunch of different ways. So now the algorithm starts recommending videos to people that they've never heard of. Often, videos more niche than the ones that they're watching. So instead of taking you toward Gangnam style,

it might take you in a more obscure direction or down sort of an adjacent rabbit hole to the one that you were in. Got it. This may sound innocuous, but the consequences of this algorithm change were huge. Because if a YouTube user was watching a video that leaned toward extreme viewpoints, YouTube would then recommend a video that was even more extreme. So like, a 9-11 was an inside-job video could lead to a moon landing was a hoax video. Or an anti-affirmative action lecture could lead to a video about eugenics. Why would any woman fight against the Patriots?

And this is how previously obscure conspiracy theorists, racists, et cetera, suddenly started getting a ton of new traffic from YouTube. In 2016, YouTube hit their goal. They blew past a billion hours a day. But the problem is they did it, at least in part, by letting all these sort of fringe voices flourish on their site. This January, YouTube tried to fix some of this. They tweet the algorithms so that it stopped record.

recommending flat earth videos, anti-vaxxer videos. But it's much harder for them to regulate this huge category of alt-right provocateurs that they elevated during their pursuit of a billion hours. Because when those people break the rules or tiptoe around them, they do so knowing that they have power. Because their whole brand is that what they're saying is dangerous and the establishment wants to shut them up. And so any action that YouTube takes risks coming off at censorship.

I think they fear political backlash if they start banning people. What kind of political backlash exactly? I mean, you've already seen congressional hearings about anti-conservative bias. You know, executives from social media companies have been dragged to Capitol Hill to explain themselves. The president is tweeting about how people can't find him on Twitter because Twitter's biased against conservatives. Stephen Crowder used this exact playbook when Carlos complained to YouTube. This is corporate censorship. And this is yet another giant company trying to lean on this channel, your channel, and the content that you've created.

And this is a war. I want to make sure that everyone understands we will fight to the absolute bitter end, both legally and publicly. Remember, this was all happening before YouTube had even rendered a verdict. Before they'd indicated they might punish Stephen Crowder in. Anyway. After five days of essentially radio silence, YouTube got back to Carlos. They told him, quote, Our teams spent the last few days conducting an in-depth review of the videos flagged to us, and while we found language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted don't violate our policies. Everyone who agreed with Carlos was enraged by this decision. But then, a day later, YouTube surprised

everybody by saying, actually, we are going to punish Stephen Crowder. We're going to going to demonetize his videos, meaning he can't make any money off of them until he changes his behavior. This made Stephen Crowder livid, and I was curious how Carlos felt about it. So they finally came back and demonetize his videos. What does that mean to you? Does it mean anything? Is it enough?

No, demonetizing doesn't work, because people who benefit from this platform aren't primarily using it because of the money that YouTube gives through ad revenue. They're using it to build an audience with a massive free technology that they otherwise wouldn't have access to. And if Stephen Crowder gets demonetize, it doesn't matter because he's able to sell merch to this now loyal fan base of customers that YouTube found for him. He can say, buy my mug, buy my socialism, is for fag shirts. Stephen Crowder has almost 4 million subscribers who hang on to his every word. It wasn't just Carlos.

A lot of the people that I talked to told me that YouTube thinks of demonetization as like a very serious punishment when many times it just isn't. I wanted to ask YouTube how they'd come to their decision. And so I asked them for an interview. If you could tell me your name and your title. Sure. Andrew Faville. I'm the head of corporate communications for YouTube. So the reason I got in touch is because I was interested in talking about YouTube's moderation,

sort of in the wake of the Stephen Crowder, Carlos Maza, blow up. And the reason I wanted to is because to me personally, what Stephen Crowder did, like, his behavior was, like, racist, homofer. It seemed tailor made to victimize Carlos Maza and to marshal Stephen Crowder's fans to, like, harass him and humiliate him, which is exactly what they did. And if I were the person who moderated YouTube, I think that I probably would have kicked him off. And that's not what YouTube's decided to do. And I'm just wondering what the calculus was in making that decision. Yeah, sure.

So I think, first of all, just to take a step back, it's important to understand what are harassment policy actually does and what it covers. Okay. And so what our harassment policy does is it looks for videos where the primary purpose of the video is to harass, insult, bully another person or to incite harassment of that person. I also think it's important to keep in mind that what a lot of folks saw in the case of the Stephen Crowder, Carlos Maza, incident. was they saw a super cut of clips that had been spliced together

from various different videos that Crowder uploaded. What Andrea is talking about here is that montage that Carlos posted to Twitter of all the nasty things that Stephen Crowder said about him. And if that exact video had been uploaded to YouTube, that video would have violated our policies. Well, I mean, if I can jump in for just a minute, after this whole dust up took place, Stephen Crowder made a video where he basically, it was his quote unquote apology video. And it was just him repeating all of the slurs that he's used in the

past in this sort of faux apology in order to be able to just say them all in a row again. I mean, and it was directed at a lot of different people. I do want to go back to like the super cut video for a second. Right. Because I do think this is important to understand. It was entirely composed of insult and harassment. And the purpose of that video, if viewed, would have been clearly to harass another person. What we were actually responding to were the videos that were uploaded on YouTube,

which were actually fairly long response videos to videos that had already been posted, discussing and debating the ideas in those videos. They included some offensive language, but it was actually a much longer political debate. Andrea said that YouTube had taken lumps from both sides in this fight. Carlos Maza supporters were mad because Stephen Crowder hadn't been banned from YouTube. And Stephen Crowder supporters were mad because he'd been demonetized.

But the thing that really surprised me about this conversation was that Andrea said YouTube didn't want to take these videos down because the context of the videos mattered. That most people only saw this supercut of insults. but if they had watched Stephen Crowder's videos in their entirety, they would understand that the offensive stuff was just a small percentage of what actually appears in the videos. I asked Carlos what he thought about this, and he found the idea really naive. It feels mind-umbing to argue this because it feels like arguing that the sky is blue or that gravity exists. Hate speech is almost always coupled with some other demand or criticism of the target.

When I was in high school, people would say, hey faggot get out of the way or hey faggot shut up and the primary intent of that speech was to get me to do something but the presence of hate speech had a very important effect and secondary impact not just on me the target but on the audience that was watching it and what youtube has done is basically say hey if you want to get away with hate speech on the platform just make sure you sandwich it between you know for 10 minutes of political nonsense that isn't that it's it's not an anti-harassment policy it's an instruction manual for how to harass, and it signals to queer people or people or color that if you want to participate in political discussions on YouTube, that part of the price we have to pay is being willing

to tolerate that we're going to get called a list be queer or get made fun of how we speak and how we act. And it's one that that costs us meaningful access to free speech because who in the right mind would want to talk about politics if they knew that every time they did, they'd get called a list be queer. When YouTube started out, it began as an idea that was very utopian. It was going to be a forum for free speech, a marketplace for ideas. And even before they'd made a ton of money, before they'd found themselves under all this political pressure, they had this genuine belief that they wanted to censor as little as possible. The problem is that the internet looks a lot more like a high school than it does like some kind of free speech

utopia. If you don't decide what's acceptable, the loudest people will. decide for you. So, have you made any video since the one that preceded this dust up? No, I haven't. Are you going to keep making videos? Yeah, that's like the plan. I don't know, honestly, like, Crowder has been super awful since all this stuff happened. I kind of know that the next thing I publish is going to get after.

bombarded by these people and that now there's like a huge target on my back. I did this job for two and a half years. I caused this big conversation about YouTube's policies and that feels important and meaningful. I didn't win. I didn't really fix anything. Maybe I like set it in motion, but I just miss being boring. There's a part of my brain that's like, I'm going to quit and go teach Sundays and Dragons to kids for the rest of my life. And that sounds really appealing. But my honest answer is, I don't know. You said something to the effect of I lost.

Is that like really how you feel? I mean, the like intellectual, not emotional part of my brain is like, you started an important conversation. But there's this other feel part of my brain that's like every morning I wake up to tweets from Stephen Crowder fans saying, he named you his employee of the month this. month because you helped him sell more mugs than he's ever sold. I think today he's like moving into a bigger studio. He's like upgrading all of his equipment. He's made a ton of money now. He gets to keep calling me a ferry or whatever he calls me on his YouTube channels. Like the day after YouTube's

announcement, he was back to saying stuff about me. And YouTube didn't admit that they had screwed up. And like everyone in my family had to like change their passwords. People ask me how this story ends, I'm going to have to say and then nothing. If I didn't lose, I, like, lost a lot in the process. Carlos Maza. You can find his old videos on the Vox website.

His series is called Strike Through. Reply All is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. We're produced by Shruthy Pinaminani, Fia Bannon, Damiano Marquetti, Anna Foley, Jessica Young, and Emmanuel Jochi. Our editor is Tim We were mixed by Rick Kwan.

Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our intern is Emily Rostic. Special thanks this week to Claire Stapleton, Megan Frockmanesh, Chris Stokel Walker, Mark Bergen, and Dieter Bone. Our theme song is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Our ad music is by Bill Buildings. Matt Leaver is watching one of your favorite movies from childhood

and finding out that it still holds up. You can listen to our show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.