Some YouTube employees are enraged at the company executives who have decided to allow YG’s song “Meet the Flockers “ to remain up, despite having language that can be perceived as anti-Asian rhetoric.
But is this a case of allowing race-based hate to thrive or are they protecting the artist’s right to free speech?
“’First, you find a house and scope it out. Find a Chinese neighborhood, cause they don’t believe in bank accounts. Second, you find a crew and a driver, someone ring the doorbell … And someone that ain’t scared to do what it do. Third, you pull up at the spot. Park, watch, ring the doorbell, and knock. Four, make sure nobody is home. They gone, okay it’s on.”
According to Bloomberg, the YouTube employees requested that the Trust & Safety team remove the video down, but to no avail.
The official statement given to them on March 22nd noted that the executives thought that YG’s song was “highly offensive and understand it is painful for many to watch, including many in Trust & Safety.”
“While we debated this decision at length amongst our policy experts, we made the difficult decision to leave the video up to enforce our policy consistently and avoid setting a precedent that may lead to us having to remove a lot of other music on YouTube.”
“In this case, this video receives an EDSA exception as a musical performance. While EDSA is not a free pass for any content, there are likely thousands of music videos that would otherwise violate policies including Sex & Nudity, Violent or Graphic Content, and Hate Speech were it not for these sorts of EDSA exception.”
The EDSA is the acronym for Educational, Documentary, Scientific, or Artistic and this particular category is allowed to rock.
“As a result, removing this video would have far-reaching implications for other musical content containing similarly violent or offensive lyrics, in genres ranging from rap to rock.”
The employees are outraged at the company’s decision not to stand with them as statistics regarding violent crimes against Asians and Pacific Americans are on a rise.
Nearly, 3,800 hate crimes have been reported between March 2020 and February 2021 to organizations like Stop AAPI Hate.
YG has not spoken out about the controversy.