YouTube Called ‘Racist’ For Tweeting ‘Subscribe To Black Creators’ On Valentines Day

To commemorate Black History Month, YouTube sent out a tweet Wednesday encouraging people to subscribe to African-American content creators on their site — a message that was met with immense backlash on social media.

“Roses are red. Violets are blue. Subscribe to black creators,” YouTube tweeted. The self-broadcasting platform had even changed its profile picture on Twitter to read “#MakeBlackHistory.”

YouTube’s post, which was aimed to boost channels run by black YouTubers, did not go down well with social media users. People started chastising the site for promoting skin color over the quality of content. Many even went as far as saying that YouTube was racist for favoring content creators with a specific skin color over those with lighter skin.

In reply to YouTube’s tweet, one user wrote: “If it said subscribe to white creators, or any other skin color it would be deemed racist. why is this okay? subscribe to all great creators, and stop dividing our contemporary society further by using skin color as a driving factor. we are all human at the end of the day.”

“... do they need more support?” asked another user. Here are some other responses to YouTube’s controversial tweet:

However, not everyone criticized YouTube's tweet.

People’s reaction to YouTube’s tweet might be also due to the fact that there are a number of African-American YouTubers who are fast becoming popular on the site.

One such YouTuber is makeup artist Jackie Aina, who recently celebrated the milestone of getting two million subscribers to her channel. Aina is an ex-army veteran who voices out her struggles of being a black woman trying to pave her way to success in the world of makeup and cosmetics, which is primarily dominated by white-skinned people, College Candy reported.

Jennie Jenkins is another fashionista and makeup artist from the United Kingdom, who is inspiring black women across the world to embrace their sense of beauty and fearlessly express themselves.

Similarly, Nyma Tang is a YouTuber who has made the “#thedarkestshade” popular among her fans, as she proudly reviews the darkest shades of an array of beauty and makeup products to determine whether they suits her skin tone.

While the company maintained that “sharing stories about facing discrimination, opening up about your sexuality, and confronting and overcoming discrimination is what makes YouTube great,” it has not always kept up its motto.

In 2010, YouTube introduced the “Restricted Mode,” a feature that filtered out content that may be inappropriate for minors. They upgraded their mode on a keyword-based filtering system in March 2017 that ended up restricting the content of a number of LGBT creators, reducing the number of viewers to those videos, the Huffington Post reported.

This led to worldwide protests from LGBT creators and YouTube was forced to release an official statement admitting the flaw in the feature.

“We understand that this has been confusing and upsetting, and many of you have raised concerns about Restricted Mode and your content being unfairly impacted,” the statement said. “The bottom line is that this feature isn’t working the way it should. We’re sorry and we’re going to fix it.”

As the social media platform tried to fix its error, it grappled with fresh scandals every now and then, the latest one being popular YouTuber Logan Paul shooting a corpse in one of his videos that led to his temporary suspension from the medium.