YouTube as a Platform for Marginalized Voices and Democracy

Introduction: New Media and Marginalized Communities

This paper examines how YouTube is able to provide a strong lifeline for marginalized people. YouTube is a fundamental public forum, one which offers individuals a means of showcasing their story to the world. It provides people who are minorities, repressed, or otherwise pushed to the fringes of society a means of sharing their experience. For some, YouTube allows them to document violations of government and civil rights, creating a level of accountability on the world stage. For others, YouTube helps foster an online community of marginalized individuals who share their stories with one another.

This paper looks at two specific groups of marginalized people — transgender teens and ordinary civilians in Venezuela — and discusses how YouTube offers each group a means of sharing their story while bringing people together in an online community.

Transgender Youth and YouTube as Digital Diary

For transgender youths, creating videos on YouTube that share their story is a means of building a sense of community and strength, helping these often-discriminated-against young people share their collective experience and grow stronger as a group. "Thousands of teens and twentysomethings who are transgender — identifying with a gender that is different than their sex at birth — have turned to YouTube as a kind of public diary. As they start taking hormones or using new names, many are documenting their journeys on video, baring their souls and revealing their changing faces to strangers online" (Reyes, 2014).

One of the most significant aspects of this phenomenon is that these youths are creating a public diary at all — something that is, in itself, revolutionary. Many of them have long been told that it is in their best interest to abandon their former selves after surgery and transition. Essentially, this advice made life easier for non-transgender people, who would not have to confront this person's alternative choices. Abandoning one's former self was simply advice given so that narrow-minded people in a narrow-minded world would not be challenged or taken out of their comfort zone. YouTube videos are, in a sense, a way of combating this mentality. YouTube creates a permanent and public diary that helps these individuals share their story — regardless of whether their journey of transformation makes others uncomfortable. When the old norm was to suppress and suffocate one's personal story, the new norm is one of sharing and disclosure.

As one transgender youth recounts, hiding one's personal story used to be a necessity, or else one would lose everything — including dating opportunities — while also becoming vulnerable to violence. "Three years ago, a national survey of more than 6,400 transgender and gender-nonconforming people found that 71% had tried to avoid discrimination by hiding their gender or gender transition. Sharing their stories remains risky: more than a third of people who were gender nonconforming or had a transgender identity before graduating from high school said they had been physically assaulted, the National Transgender Discrimination Survey found" (Reyes, 2014). If violence and bias were the only obstacles this marginalized group faced, the situation would still be serious enough — but society tends to have difficulty accepting these young people for who they truly are. Unlike members of the gay community, who "come out" and showcase who they are, transgender youths face the additional challenge that their disclosure leads some people to view them as less than the real men and women they claim to be.

Venezuelan Student Protesters and Censored Media

It is widely acknowledged that Americans are often overly focused on their own country and its problems — so much so that this can create a sense of both indifference and ignorance about injustices occurring overseas. In the case of Venezuelan student protests, YouTube provided a platform and a voice for students, showcasing their struggles in ways that professional journalists were not permitted to. This is no small feat. The Venezuelan government has a strong track record of concealing the realities of its own actions and the conditions within its borders. Acts of violence and intimidation were swept under the rug via state-run media.

Consider the events that unfolded: "The Venezuelan government has expelled CNN reporters from within its borders, as unrest continues to intensify within the country. The expulsion comes after multiple warnings that the network would be banned from the country if they did not bring coverage in line with the message of the state-run media. 'Enough war propaganda,' President Nicolás Maduro said. 'I do not accept war propaganda against Venezuela. If they do not rectify things, get out of Venezuela, CNN, get out.' The move leaves almost no television networks left in the country aside from the state-run networks, which have largely ignored the national unrest" (Brandom, 2014). This excerpt is entirely revealing of the political climate of that nation. Having outside sources expose the realities of the country to the rest of the world is labeled as war propaganda. The government, acutely aware of the rampant injustices and terror it was permitting, sought to prevent any public record from being made. After the removal of CNN, acts of violence against student protesters continued to escalate. Student protesters were shot and killed, "including the recent death of Genesis Carmona, a 22-year-old student who had been named Miss Tourism 2013 for her home state of Carabobo" (Brandom, 2014).

Fortunately for the people of Venezuela, this is the age of social media, and a meaningful level of accountability cannot be suppressed. Within the realm of video-sharing platforms like YouTube, it becomes increasingly difficult to hide state-induced terror. Venezuela's tactics might have succeeded twenty years ago, but in the modern era, there is simply too much exposure and too great an opportunity for individuals to share their experiences with the world. Social media makes it genuinely difficult to repress people without consequence.

One emerging filmmaker created a short film entitled "What's Going on in Venezuela in a Nutshell." This film was significant because it provided an uncensored snapshot of the struggles, violence, injustice, and oppression occurring in that nation — events of which the rest of the world would otherwise have been ignorant. "There were three confirmed deaths of students in last week's protests, all gunshot-related. The film shows one protester being hit over the back with a gun by an armed policeman, and then kicked in the head. At one point, Nash's voiceover stops while the footage rolls — oblique-angled street scenes, patches of sunlight cutting across shadowy long-range views of tiny demonstrators pouring down a road, while a whip cracks relentlessly, the sound of rapid gunfire. Nash took the images from the Venezuela Lucha Instagram page, which has been documenting the violence" (The Guardian, 2014).

References

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The Guardian. (2014, February). How a first-time filmmaker alerted the world to Venezuela's student protests. Retrieved from theguardian.com: http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/feb/17/short-film-venezuela-student-protests-youtube