Section:GDN 12 PaGe:4 Edition Date:190815 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 14/8/2019 17:38 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian
4 Thursday 15 August 2019
‘YouTube is scared. It thinks
LGBT videos are controversial’
‘ 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. They are sitting in their
workout gear, on the familiar grey
couch where they record the
YouTube videos that have turned
them into stars. But there are no
signature dazzling smiles today.
This morning, the couple uploaded
a video called Ten Ways to KnowYou’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 demoneti sed,”
Kam says. Age-restricted videos
cannot be found using YouTube’s
search engine, and can only be
watched by people who have signed
in to a YouTube account and given
their age as over 18 – which means
many of the pair’s core teenage
audience would not be able to see it.
Demonetised means YouTube has
decided the content is “unfriendly”
for most advertisers , so Chambersthe chain’s CEO condemned same-
sex marriage, went viral. It made
them realise there was a living to
be made on the platform.
More than a million people now
subscribe to their two YouTube
channels : a mix of comedy , music
and self-help videos. It has made
them among the best-known lesbian
duos on the platform. In other
words, for the past seven years,
YouTube has given them a career, an
income and hundreds of millions of
young, female viewers.
But yesterday they joined six other
LGBT YouTube stars to fi le 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 thatand Kam w ill also not be making any
advertising revenue from it.
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.
YouTube has turned Kam and
Chambers into stars. Kam, 32, is a
singer-songwriter who once appeared
on American Idol; Chambers, 28, is
an actor and personal trainer. They
have been together since 2011 and
married last year. The pair uploaded
their fi rst YouTube video in 2012,
expecting only their mothers to watch
it , but their second video, a comedy
protest song they wrote about the
fast-food restaurant Chick-fi l-A afterThe video platform
made stars of Bria
Kam and Chrissy
Chambers. But
now they say they
are losing their
voice and their
living because of
discrimination.
They talk to
Jenny Kleeman
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