Sex panic?

Is YouTube punishing queer sex educators for advertising adult toys?

Pup Amp, sex educator, YouTube, Adam & Eve, sex toys, censorship
Pup Amp Somers, a sex educator whose series “Watts the Safeword” appears on YouTube. (image via Pup Amp Twitter)

Several queer YouTube content creators have claimed via Twitter that the video-sharing platform is threatening to delete their channels because their videos contain sponsored links to Adam & Eve, a site that sells adult toys.

One such YouTuber contacted The Daily Dot with an email from YouTube saying that their “link to Adam & Eve’s site violated the rule against ‘content that contains nudity and is meant to be sexually gratifying.'”

Related: Queer video producers file suit against YouTube for discrimination

Two other queer YouTubers, Stef Sanjati and Alayna Fender, have received similar warnings from YouTube. The warnings are particularly consequential because if YouTube issues three strikes against a channel, the site will then delete the channel completely, wiping out all of a vlogger’s uploaded videos, subscribers, fan base and means of making money through the site.

What’s weirder is that not every YouTuber with a sponsorship with Adam & Eve has received a similar warning. Bigger queer content creators and sex educators like Davey Wavey and Trisha Paytas haven’t said that they’ve received similar warnings, nor has Amp Somers, a sex educator who hosts his kink-friendly YouTube series Watts the Safeword.

A YouTube spokesperson has since told The Daily Dot that “it ‘incorrectly’ gave strikes to creators who had sponsor links to Adam & Eve in their videos, adding, “With the massive volume of videos on our site, we sometimes make mistakes. When we do, we work to resolve them as quickly as possible. In this case, we incorrectly issued strikes on videos with links to an adult toy site. When this was brought to our attention, we worked quickly to resolve the strikes for all affected creators.”

But at least one of the queer content creators who complained about the strike says the matter still hasn’t been resolved.

This is particularly troubling considering the YouTube has been accused of hiding LGBTQ content from searches, demonetizing videos for mentioning transgender issues and not doing enough to protect queer content creators from harassment.

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