Culture

Nakhane “livid” after YouTube put age restriction on his video featuring same-sex love

By Lewis Corner

27th April 2018

Nakhane has criticised YouTube for putting an age restriction on his music video for Clairvoyant.

The visual stars the South African singer-songwriter in a relationship with another man, as a number of love scenes plays out with brief partial nudity.

In order to watch the clip, users must verify that they are over 18 as it has been age-restricted in accordance with YouTube’s Community Guidelines.

“I am livid that YouTube has given my video for ‘Clairvoyant’ an age restriction,” Nakhane tweeted.

Related: Nakhane Touré interview: ‘My positivity is a f**k you to all those people who wish me ill’

“I’m interested in what the criteria is for this when there are videos with heterosexuals being explicit with no restriction. 1 step forward 3 steps back in this world if you’re not straight, huh?”

His followers agreed, with actress and TV presenter Sade Giliberti stating: “The model is messed up. 3 of my videos have been flagged due to the ‘lesbian’ content. It’s trolls flagging & getting them either demonetised or restricted. YouTube need to up their game in how they just allow this without actually viewing content themselves.”

Another follower added: “They don’t actually personally review any of it unless they have a specific reason to, primarily it’s all down to viewers to decide if something’s inappropriate, hence why you have loads of online trolls flagging ASMR videos etc and getting them demonetized.”

It comes a year after the Google-owned video platform announced fixes to its Restricted Mode that will stop it from censoring LGBTQ content.

YouTube came under fire last April when some prominent YouTubers claimed  it was censoring some of their LGBTQ videos from being accessed, despite them not containing offensive or explicit material.

“After a thorough investigation, we started making several improvements to Restricted Mode,” Johanna Wright, YouTube’s vice president of product management, said on their blog at the time.

“On the engineering side, we fixed an issue that was incorrectly filtering videos for this feature, and now 12 million additional videos of all types—including hundreds of thousands featuring LGBTQ+ content—are available in Restricted Mode.”