Platforms like YouTube and X say anti-trans documentaries don’t violate guidelines — but advocacy groups call them “propaganda”

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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    In a political landscape already fraught for the transgender community, right-wing media organizations have found a new way to bypass platform guidelines prohibiting hate speech, by producing documentaries advocacy groups are calling “propaganda” and promoting them with carefully edited trailers.

    Starting in June, right-wing outlet The Epoch Times began promoting its own documentary, Gender Transformation: The Untold Realities, with both skippable and unskippable advertisements that play before users are able to watch YouTube videos.

    The site also prohibits advertisements that “display shocking content or promote hatred, intolerance, discrimination, or violence,” but negative events and imagery from professional media are evaluated under different criteria, which allows for documentaries and news organizations so long as the source is clearly linked.

    In Gender Transformation, The Epoch Times presents several arguments that imply the transgender movement is being funded by high-ranking government officials, directly causing suicide and inflated death rates, and is promoted by medical organizations in an attempt to make as much money as possible— all claims that would most likely prevent the video from being monetized and could lead to its removal if posted on YouTube.

    In conjunction with concerted efforts by Republican lawmakers to strip health care rights away from the transgender community, the promotion of violating content with ads and edited trailers doesn’t just allow right-wing organizations to circumvent hate-speech protections — it could cause direct violence to LGBTQ people.

    And 2023 reports from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the Anti-Defamation League, and GLAAD all found increased incidents of violence (including harassment, vandalism, and assault) in states where conservative politicians have spearheaded anti-LGBTQ bills.


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