5.Lindsay Amer (Queer Kid Stuff)
173.Plaintiff Lindsay Amer is the creator and owner of Queer Kid Stuff, a YouTube educational channel created to serve as a support for LGBTQ+ parents, LGBTQ+ children between the ages of 3 and 17, who have questions or face bullying for perceived LGBTQ+ status, and librarians and educators seeking assistance with respect to how to field questions about LGBTQ+ issues and support children affected by LGBTQ+ issues. Mx. Amer has an undergraduate degree in gender studies and theater; and a graduate degree in performance studies.
174.In 2015, they created the Queer Kid Stuff channel as a vehicle to upload their original video content. On May10, 2016, Mx. Amer uploaded the first Queer Kid Stuff education video. Initially, the video was shared and received roughly 2,000 views without negative comments or reaction videos. Within months of the uploading of the first video, the Huffington Post published a favorable article discussing the video.
175.On June 23, 2016, The Daily Stormer, a Neo Nazi website on that appears on Defendant Google’s search engine site published a commentary by Andrew Anglin entitled, “Sick Dyke Creates Educational Program to Brainwash Children Into the Homosexual Lifestyle,” which quotes from the Huffington Post article, and bashes both Queer Kid Stuff and Ms. Amer:
“Lindsey Amer is a twisted lesbo who is obsessed with psychologically abusing children, and has created an entire ‘educational’ program to teach children to become homosexual perverts. . . . [Homos] are always pushing for the ability to recruit younger and younger victims into their sex-cult, and now, our jewed-out society has reached the point where we are ready to show their recruitment propaganda to pre-schoolers – in order to prove we’re not haters, of course. . . . Please visit this creature on Twitter and let her know what you think of her plot. . . . Oh, and ask her if she’s Jewish.”
A Anglin, Daily Stormer, June 23, 2016. The article included a link to the Queer Kid Stuff Twitter account and Mx. Amer’s personal profile.
176.The Daily Stormer commentary generated an avalanche of hate speech directed at Mx. Amer and the Queer Kid Stuff channel. The hate speech involved vicious and obscene anti-Semitic, misogynist, and homophobic content, as well as other obscene material, and culminated in a death threat against Mx. Amer. Defendants permitted all of that hate speech to appear directly in the comment section of Mx. Amer’s Queer Kid Stuff channel. And although Defendant Google finally removed The Daily Stormer from their platform in the fall of 2017, the hate speech directed at Mx. Amer continued unabated on the channel.
177.As with the other the LGBTQ+ Plaintiffs in this case, Mx. Amer supports the right of all to express their viewpoints in a civil and protected manner. But Mx. Amer, and the other LGBTQ+ Plaintiffs take serious issue with Defendants systematic efforts to restrain or financially harm Mx. Amer’s content and their ability to defend and protect themselves on a platform that promises to treat everyone equally. That is not the case here, because Defendants selectively apply their content-based regulations and filtering to promote and profit from homophobic hatemongers who are allowed to inundate Mx. Amer and other LGBTQ+ channels when thecontent directly and objectively violates Defendants content-based rules that they claim exist only to “keep the platform safe” for all of the YouTube Community, including Mx. Amer and the other LGBTQ+ members of that Community.
178.On September 14, 2016, four months after Mx. Amer uploaded the first video to the Queer Kid Stuff channel, they uploaded the second video. The four month delay between the first and second video was the direct result of the fear and chilling affect that the hate speech allowed and/or promoted by Defendants had on Mx. Amer. Mx. Amer was and continues to be unable to remove that hate speech using Defendants’ available filter tool. Repeated attempts to handle the tidal waves of hate speech that Defendants continue to allow to be directed at the Queer Kid Stuff channel has also interfered with Mx. Amer’s ability to reach and engage with their intended audience.
179.In total, Queer Kid Stuff published 12 new videos between September 14, 2016 and January 27, 2017. With the uploading of each new video, a new wave of hate speech filled the comments section of the channel. For every positive comment that appeared, dozens of hate-filled comments appeared and pushed the positive comment down the queue so that viewers would only see hate-filled comments when they watched Queer Kid Stuff content.
180.Despite repeated complaints to Defendants about the hate speech comments, and after devoting considerable efforts to reconfigure the Defendants’ filters to screen them, a number of members of Queer Kid Stuff’s intended audience, including parents, wrote to Mx. Amer complaining about the obscene hateful comments posted on the Queer Kid Stuff channel and informing Mx. Amer, that despite their approval of the intended content on the channel, these parents could not share the quality videos with their children, because it would expose the children to content which they deemed harmful and injurious. One parent wrote:
“I’m really glad that I ran into your channel today, as I found the videos to be easy enough for my 5 year old to enjoy and understand the content. This really is a godsend for me, a trans demi girl who has major problems with panic attacks just trying to address the subject with them. The only thing that I wish would get addressed with your channel would be doing something with the comments section. While it’s great that there are some positive encouragement from some viewers, others turn it into a dumpster fire dipped in cancer. I’m glad that my child can’t read well enough to understand the comments, but I think other children will inherently get exposed to transphobic, ablest, and queerphobic nonsense that may undermine the positive message of the videos.”
Another parent wrote:
“My 7 year old son (who self-identifies as queer) is home from school today. . . We love your channel . . . I wanted to reach out because even though we watch your videos, I have a strict policy against reading YouTube comments. YouTube suggested a bunch of hateful anti-queer videos in response to our watching yours, and as I went through the list to tell YouTube I am not interested in any of these, I ended up reading some of the comments. How disheartening. Talk about homophobia. I am literally crying right now at some of these and am quite glad my son is in the other room, since I’m not sure I’m emotionally up to explain it to him right now. . . .”
181.Because Defendants failed to regulate or filter the hate speech directed to the Queer Kid Stuff channel between 2016 and 2018, Mx. Amer was forced to disable the comments section to the channel in the fall of 2018 and to forego the ability to fully engage with and reach Queer Kid Stuff’s intended audience with its content. In the process, however, Mx. Amer noticed the hatemongers had started to upload and copy portions of or entire Queer Kid Stuff videos that they then displayed on the platform with disparaging, obscene, and hateful content, including fake voiceovers, or with the commentator inserted into a frame in the corner of the Queer Kid Stuff videos. Most of the reaction videos include links to the Queer Kid Stuff channel which acted as an amplifier for generating hate speech comments.
182.The obscene, hate speech filled reaction videos, many of which were spawned by The Daily Stormer article, also appear in searches for Queer Kid Stuff on YouTube, and appear in “Up Next,” recommendations on the screen whenever viewers watched Queer Kid Stuff videos, thereby exposing LGBTQ+ parents and children to inappropriate hurtful material. Mx. Amer repeatedly complained to Google/YouTube about the hate speech reaction videos which appear in the recommended “Up Next” material, and in the search results for “Queer Kid Stuff,” but Defendants refused to subject that content to their Community Guidelines and other speech regulations, or to prevent reaction video creators from posting links to the Queer Kid Stuff channel on the reaction videos.
83.In all, Queer Kid Stuff has uploaded more than 100 videos, of which Defendants have only allowed 94 to remain accessible to viewers; the channel has more than 2 million views and more than 15,000 subscribers. Queer Kid Stuff’s growth has been substantially stymied by Defendants’ selected, discriminatory, anticompetitive and unlawful use of its content regulation and monetization policies and practices, and has generated less than $500 per year. Defendants should be ashamed of themselves for promising LGBTQ+ consumers that the same rules apply equally to everyone and then singling out the LGBTQ+ Plaintiffs, like Mx. Amer, and the greater LGBTQ+ Community for content and monetization violations while promoting and profiting from homophobic hate speech that threatens violence and goes unregulated on the YouTube platform.
