YouTube can be a space where people can express themselves freely. Unfortunately, its liberal institutions are also sometimes used to perpetuate hatred in already vulnerable communities, such as the Moroccan trans activist Eden Ghali who was a victim of such attacks.
Ghali, 28, has been open about his journey as a trans man from Morocco, where the trans community is neither criminalized nor put at risk by the state. For Ghali, making his story public is a way to help like-minded people feel less alone.
But a vicious cyber attack by Abdelouahed Benomar and his millions of followers about two weeks ago pushed him to the limit. B3a9li — posted three videos targeting Ghali and the transgender community. In the videos, B3a9li compared gay people to dirt. It stated that people like Ghali who identify or support the LGBTQIA+ community “are against Muslim and Moroccan values” and are part of a conspiracy to destroy society. Then, B3a9li accompanied his content with screenshots of Ghali's social accounts, prompting his viewers to start a boycott and flooding Ghali and his supporters with messages of hate.
(Those videos are deleted by this blogger)
Not to be outdone, Ghali saw this and launched his counterattack: He used social media profiles to rally allies. People posted pictures and retweeted his story under #Ghali, and more than 1,000 people signed a petition calling for B3a9li's video to be removed. "It's very frustrating to know that such an attack can happen to anyone, and there's very little that can be done about it," Ghali explained in an interview with Al-Monitor.
It took YouTube two weeks to respond to the report and eventually removed three videos from B3a9li's account. But the deletion of the video does not mean that the problem has been solved; Ghali received many physical threats or abuse when the video was not deleted, which made him very frustrated at one time. And YouTube just deleted the video without directly apologizing to Ghali. A 2022 study by the Social Media Safety Index (SMSI) specifically ranked platforms based on how safe they are for LGBTQ users, with YouTube at 45%. The platform's official policy is to protect users from "hate speech, harassment, and cyberbullying based on protected attributes, including sexual orientation and gender identity."
However, SMSI said YouTube has never claimed to train staff on the needs of LGBTQ users. In response, the Index recommended that the platform develop a policy against "targeted necromancy and sexism." Despite YouTube's policy against hate speech, SMSI said there was limited information about the options available to users to "control the company's handling of information related to their sexual orientation and gender identity." Therefore, there is a loophole in the way content is monitored. From the moment a video goes live, vulnerable groups have no control over what is posted about them — as in Ghali's case.
Reference
1. https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2023/03/morocco-youtube-one-tool-attack-lgbtq-vulnerable-communities
2. https://www.fandmglobalbarometers.org/countries/morocco/
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