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YouTube Punishes Closed Comments (and hence, feminist content)

From https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/opinion/sunday/save-free-speech-from-trolls.html?_r=0:

“There are women who have said to me, or to people in my circles, that they don’t want to be me,” Ms. Sarkeesian told me. “They don’t want what happened to me to happen to them, and so they keep their head down and they stay quiet.” Absence is invisible. We don’t even know who has been lost — how many were scared away before they even started. What about their speech?

Refusing to quit, as Ms. Sarkeesian has, yields often invisible professional consequences as well. “Our videos on YouTube don’t get promoted and supported in their algorithms the same way that hate videos about us do, because we can’t have comments open,” she said. “That punishes us.”



last updated july 2017