“It happened again today,” Bria Kam tells me, throwing her arms up in frustration. I am speaking to Kam and her wife, Chrissy Chambers, over FaceTime from their home in Vancouver, Washington. This morning, the couple uploaded a video called Ten Ways to Know You’re in Love (Do You Want a Baby?), a benign collection of comedy sketches (including one in which Chambers falls asleep while Kam is talking, and another in which Chambers is going through her rock collection) followed by an interview with a lesbian couple who had conceived a child with donor sperm.
“The second it went live it was age-restricted and demonetised,” Kam says. It happened so quickly that there was no way the decision could have been made by a person: there was no time for anyone to have watched the video. So why did it happen? Chambers and Kam think they know; YouTube’s algorithm, they believe, is discriminating against them.
Today they have joined six other LGBT YouTube stars to file a class action lawsuit against the platform and its owner Google, suing them for “discrimination, fraud, unfair and deceptive business practices” and “unlawful restraint of speech”.
This is because the group say that the YouTube algorithm – purpose-built software that YouTube relies on to recommend, censor and place advertising on videos – discriminates against LGBT YouTubers purely because they produce LGBT content.
Algorithms use automated reasoning to cut through swathes of data – data sets too large for any human to analyse – to make decisions. They are everywhere: recommending content on Spotify; making suggestions for future purchases from Amazon; telling Netflix what kind of original content to commission; and used by banks to decide if you should have a mortgage. They are not only ubiquitous and unseen but also very powerful. And in an age in which increasingly mighty tech giants leave it to algorithms to decide who gets access to audiences, the LGBT class action against YouTube is significant for all of us, regardless of our sexuality. If software that is supposed to be neutral is already discriminating against entire communities, who will be next? Read more via the Guardian