The “anti-bias avatar” I chose for this journal entry is a twelve year old Black girl who is especially interested in superheroes/comic books. I decided to use YouTube as the website I would search for videos on that are related to this topic. YouTube is a video sharing platform owned by Google where users can upload free content for their audience (subscribers) to watch. YouTube content usually is fairly short-form, mostly being anywhere from 10-20 minutes long. I chose YouTube because it’s one of my most used social media apps and I was curious as to what would come up for my searches because I don’t personally frequently search for anything related to comics/superheroes.

• As you can see by this first screenshot, comic books were what I searched for first in the YouTube search bar. As I watched the top three videos that come up after the initial search, I noticed that all three “creators” (although, the Pawn Stars channel is more so an extension of the popular TV show, the men featured in the video are all white) were white men.

• After scrolling about halfway down the page, I noticed that there was one POC creator who is featured. However, all of the videos before we see his channel are made by white men or feature white men talking about comic books/movies that also feature mostly just white men.

• Because I was having trouble finding videos that featured any creators who are POC, I decided to just search the term “black superheroes” and what came up was immediately disappointing. As you can see from the screenshot above, the first three videos are indeed about Black superheroes (although not necessarily made by Black creators). However, the video thumbnail for the third video features Black Panther and who I assume to be an overtly sexualized version of Storm from the X-Men comic books.

• As I scrolled down a bit more, I noticed another video where there is an overtly sexualized Black woman in the thumbnail while the male character is fully clothed in his superhero costume. For both this thumbnail and the pervious example, one could conclude that these thumbnails are simply made to draw in clicks for the video. However, when comparing these images of Black women to the Black men in the same image and keeping in mind that a twelve year old girl is looking at this, it’s easy to see that the men aren’t being sexualized at all and that this could be damaging, in the long run, for a young girl to see and continue to see throughout her lifetime. Although women should be free to embrace their sexuality however they choose, I think it’s important to pay attention to who is creating and designing these characters. Are they designed by men or women? Are the people creating the thumbnails men or women? Is the content being created by men or women? A twelve year old Black girl listening to another Black woman talk about her favorite Black superheroes (male or female) could be an important experience in understanding part of her identity and finding community for such a young girl. However, when she is rarely able to see other POC at all (because of YouTube’s flawed search bar algorithm), let alone POC women, talking about things she’s interested in (and when she does, the people who she can identify with are all being sexualized), that can be detrimental to her self-worth and self-esteem in the long run.

I think it’s important to promote all creators on every social media platform. However, flagging thumbnails depending on what they have in them and making sure that everyone has equal opportunity to talk about the things that they love and be seen by the same wide audience as those who regularly get millions of views on their videos, is important. I think fixing who is seen and what is seen first after searching for something on YouTube would be important to so many people who might otherwise feel like the only content on the website is made by mostly white men.