YouTube Bans Women of Sex Tech 2020 Live-streaming Conference

LOS ANGELES—For the first time, the annual Women of Sex Tech conference was an all-livestream event this year. But the conference, which took place on May 2, came close to not happening at all, because the intended streaming service — the Google-owned YouTube — suddenly banned the stream for “violating community guidelines,” according to a report by The Daily Dot news site.  “I was so confused,” Women of Sex Tech President Alison Falk told the site. “I thought it had to be a glitch considering there was no mention of sex or adult content at that time.” Initial test streams went off without a hitch, according to Falk, but on Friday a test was abruptly cut off by YouTube with the message referencing the streaming platform’s “community guidelines.”  Falk attempted three more test streams — and was cut off with the same message each time. The setback comes in what started off as a potential breakthrough year for the public acceptance of women’s sex tech. For the first time, sexual technology companies were included — though not prominently featured — at the annual CES electronics show in January.  The annual Women of Sex Tech conference was moved to an all-online format in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has largely ended large gatherings, conferences, and public events for much of the year at least. But with less than 24 hours to go, Falk said, YouTube’s seemingly bizarre and arbitrary banning left even the virtual version of the conference without a home. "At that point, we began scrambling to figure out what we could do and ended up having to fork over a couple hundred dollars for conferencing software to make sure the show would still go on!” she told the tech news site Motherboard.  For a $195 fee, Falk and the group’s vice president SX Noir were able to move the conference to the business-videoconferencing site Crowdcast, and the show was able to go on. A YouTube spokesperson told Daily Dot that the sudden banning was attributable to an error by the company’s content-monitoring algorithm, which has come into heavier use during the coronavirus pandemic because most of the actual human workers whose job it is to monitor the site have been sent home. “We know that this may result in some videos being removed that do not violate our policies,” said the YouTube mouthpiece. “but this allows us to continue to act quickly and protect our ecosystem. If creators think that their content was removed in error, they can appeal decisions and our teams will take a look.” Photo By Germany Photography / Pixabay