YouTube said on Twitter the other day that it is investigating a complaint against Steven Crowder made by a Vox host:
THE HILL – YouTube is investigating conservative commentator Steven Crowder after Vox host Carlos Maza accused him of harassment and making derogatory comments about his ethnicity and sexuality.
YouTube responded to Maza’s tweet thread detailing his allegations, saying that it was “looking into it further.”
The company also confirmed to The Hill that it was investigating in response to Maza’s thread, but declined to comment further.
Maza, the host of Vox’s media literacy series “Strikethrough,” accused Crowder on Twitter this week of “repeated, overt attacks on my sexual orientation and ethnicity.” He said that the pundit has called him “an anchor baby” and “a lispy queer.” He also said that Crowder’s videos have caused him to be the “target of ridiculous harassment,” adding that “it makes life sort of miserable.”
The Vox host told his followers to flag Crowder’s videos and said he did not believe YouTube would take a stand against the commentator. He accused the company of not caring about its LGBT creators.
Here’s the video montage Maza posted with this complaint about Crowder:
Since I started working at Vox, Steven Crowder has been making video after video “debunking” Strikethrough. Every single video has included repeated, overt attacks on my sexual orientation and ethnicity. Here’s a sample: pic.twitter.com/UReCcQ2Elj
— Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) May 31, 2019
Youtube responded that it was looking into the matter:
Thanks so much for outlining all of this–we’re looking into it further. Sending you a DM now.
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) May 31, 2019
Crowder saw this and responded to it on Friday in this video:
The Hill continues:
Crowder posted a video to YouTube on Friday responding to the investigation and Maza’s allegations. He framed the events as an attack by Vox on a successful competitor, claiming that Vox “can’t compete” with his channel.
“I’m really hoping that YouTube doesn’t capitulate to a multihundred-million-dollar corporation who’ve had a long history of advocating corporate censorship,” he said. “I’m hoping YouTube doesn’t cave simply because of political and huge financial pressure.”
“This is not really an example of hate speech or even just offensive speech versus a self-proclaimed queer creator,” he added. “This is an example of a giant, multinational media conglomeration … attempting to squash a competitor.”
Crowder also defended past comments he made about Maza, saying his references to Maza as “the gay Latino host at Vox” was “friendly ribbing” and noting that Maza often refers to himself as gay or queer. He also said he has discouraged doxxing or other targeted harassment online.
“You speak with a lisp, and you refer to yourself as a queer,” he said. “That, along with the LGBTQ moniker, has genuinely made me think that ‘queer’ is one of the more suitable terms. If not, I don’t understand the rulebook.”
Crowder is an entertainer but he also fights the left hard. And in that montage he clearly goes after Maza because he doesn’t respect his writing. Maza claims he’s getting harassed on Instagram and Twitter and that he’s been doxxed, but Crowder says he’s discouraged all of that.
Will YouTube dump Crowder after their investigation? I hope not. But given their track record in the past and what we know from Breitbart leaks, I don’t have a lot of faith that they will be fair to him.