Jun 28, 2022
Are Male Content Creators Obligated to Talk About Abortion?
An interesting series of tweets after Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade.
The morning after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade to end 50 years of legalized abortion, a new video appeared in my YouTube feed.
Daniel Batal and Roberto Blake recorded a livestream at VidCon in Anaheim, California. The first in-person gathering of YouTube content creators since the pandemic started over two years ago. The topic that their channels have in common was growing on YouTube in 2022.
The timing looked bad. Never mind that abortion and content creation are unrelated topics. Neither Batal nor Blake would make abortion-related videos on their channels, as it wasn’t a suitable topic for their respective audiences.
I figured someone would virtue signal off that video to condemn them on Twitter. That did happen but in two different ways.
The first tweets to caught my attention was from Shannon Morse, a female tech YouTuber.
Her tweets summed up the situation quite well. Male content creators were silent and fearful of losing followers while women content creators were losing their reproductive rights.
Also a warning that silence was complicity. A sentiment I saw quite a bit as the tweets went flying over the weekend.
Batal weighed in with his own tweet in response, noting that he wasn’t silent but the issue started with Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans.
Charles got attacked on Twitter for defending Batal and Blake for not being vocal about abortion on their accounts.
The attack was pure virtue signaling by someone who doesn’t care about the issue and wanted the attention of being right.
Batal retweeted his tweet to Morse in response to Charles. Blake haven’t responded at all, and, quite frankly, I don’t expect him to do so.
Do male content creators have an obligation to talk about controversial topics that aren’t relevant to their audience?
No.
I generally avoid controversial topics that fall under GRAPES (guns, religion, abortion, politics, economics, and sex) for videos on my YouTube channel.
There are two ways to grow a channel: slow and steady or fast and furious.
I’ve been slow growing my channel for the last five years and working towards monetization. If I wanted to grow my channel fast, I could embrace those topics at the risk of not getting monetized.
I did write an essay about my mother telling me she would have aborted me if abortion was legal in 1969. A timely topic I wrote on the evening after the Supreme Court ruling for a different audience not driven by an algorithm.
