Hiding hate speech on YouTube

With any luck, if you start the video embedded at the end of the full post you'll get a message that the video is no longer available. If it does play, what you will find starts out harmlessly enough, mixing images from the 80's cartoon He-Man and the Masters of the Universe with The Village People song "Macho Man." It looks like the kind of silly fan-created video found throughout YouTube. But then towards the end of the video, a homophobic message comes up, as can be seen below:

One of the disappointing aspects of this video is that it's been viewed over 20,000 times and saved to a user's favorite videos folder by 18 users. Amid all this exposure, saying "All fags burn in hell" has managed to go unflagged by YouTube users (or, alternately, the video has been flagged and passed by YouTube's screeners). Our sister site recently noted how LGBT content on YouTube is frequently suppressed by abuse of the site's "Flag as inappropriate" feature, while similar heterosexually-themed content gets a pass. Here, a blatantly homophobic message is going unnoticed.

It's likely that every time the video has been viewed, the viewer didn't watch it until the end and didn't see the example of hate speech -- therefore having no reason to think the video should be reported. That's a small consolation, however, since that still means a large number of viewers must've gotten to the hateful message at the end and the video remains unflagged.

What's truly fascinating, though, is that someone would spend hours poring through He-Man episodes to find the moments where Prince Adam comes off as effeminate, splicing them together, and syncing them to the music, just to throw in a bit of hate speech at the end. It's gay panic in pen-and-ink. Did the creator feel the need to assert his/her hatred for gays after spending all that time fixating on gay-coded images? What would motivate someone to put so much energy into this spiteful message in the first place? Or is it just a misfired attempt at politically incorrect humor? Whatever the reason, it appears that a large number of YouTube users were fine with "All fags burn in hell." Watch the full clip below.