Last May, we shared with you the story of Matt Powell and Skylar Fiction.
Fiction is an atheist who runs a Youtube channel where he discusses, and sometimes confronts, religions and religious figures.
Back in May, Fiction had a livestream broadcast in which he spoke to Christin Preacher Matt Powell. The conversation quickly turned into how fundamentalist Christians demonize LGBTQ people and homosexuality.
Within eight minutes, Powell opened up about his true thoughts on homosexuality.
“As far as homosexuality goes, I believe the Bible puts the death penalty on it,” Powell said. “I believe it’s disgusting. And incidentally, every scientific test has come back and said that homosexuals are 50 more times likely to get AIDS… we got this AIDS thing spreading… it’s a fact that this is the case.”
“I believe the Bible puts the death penalty on it,” Powell continued. “Obviously, not by me or anybody in a regular society, obviously. I believe it’s the government’s job to execute criminals. I believe that the Bible says clearly that homosexuality is a criminal crime. It’s a crime. It’s one of the worst crimes ever.”
While many on the internet were shocked and disgusted by Powell’s words, many also applauded Fiction for confronting and debating with the preacher. Unfortunately, Youtube wasn’t as appreciative.
At the start of this week, Fiction found that Youtube not only took down the video of Fiction and Powell’s debate, but also punished him for even having it.
Fiction reached out to news source DeadState to share that Youtube had taken down the video since it promoted “hate speech,” added a strike to his channel, and banned him from live streams for three months.
“It’s sad that I can’t even ask people questions about what they believe without getting flagged for promoting hate speech,” Skylar said. “This is obviously not what I was doing. I was showing the ignorance of Matt’s point of view and countering his positions. If people in this country are not aware that people like Matt exist, they have no opportunity to challenge their ideas.”
To counteract this decision, Skylar Fiction tried to appeal the temporary ban, but he was quickly rejected.
“It didn’t go well,” he says in the video below. “My appeal has been denied … Now I’m on I guess a probation period for 90 days I cannot go live.”
“Matt was telling his opinions which are disgusting and awful, but the point of my program is not to promote hate, and I was arguing against it.”
While all of this was happening, Matt Powell’s Youtube channel remained up and running.
Thankfully, reaching out to news sources and asking for the support of his fans led to Fiction getting the ban lifted. As he shared with fans last night, the strike on his channel has been taken off and he is free to have live stream debates again.
This is just another issue caused by Youtube’s reporting system and censorship algorithm. You’d think the company would want to fix its system to prevent further issues, but each new incident is proving to us that they don't intend to.
If I was teaching college
If I was teaching college ethics, law, or even philosophy, I'd use this as an example of how complicated debates about free speech are. One person's (or in this case, Youtube's) hate speech is another person's free speech (or even debate). [My blood pressure sky rockets at the preacher's condescending attitude condemning us to death based on his reading of a book of fiction; so there's where I see the hate speech.] But also, this raises the question as to who should decide what is hate versus free speech — certainly not You Tube or Facebook; but who, then? And finally, just because some speech is offensive, should it be banned?
This is not to say I don't believe anything goes. I agree that shouting "fire" in a crowded building should be banned, even if it is not hate speech. But also, if memory serves, there used to be a thing called "fighting words" as an example of speech that can be responded to with violence; e.g., if I call someone a term that could be reasonably construed as an aggressive attack on them.
Back to this, I'm glad that Powell got back on Youtube.
YouTube is homophobic. This
YouTube is homophobic. This is no surprise.