In the past six months, Selena Gomez has been using her platform to call attention to sites, such as Facebook, that spread misinformation and lies. On Saturday, Gomez called out YouTube's
role in spreading false reports and rumors.
"I love @YouTube and put a music video on there the other day... how can this be happening?," she wrote when she retweeted Imran Ahmed, the CEO of Center for Countering Digital Hate and Stop Funding Fake News. "I don't want my fans or anyone to be funding hate or violence."
"READ: @YouTube funds hate and extremism by allowing live donations on videos containing misinformation and lies," Ahmed wrote. "Worse, *they take a cut*. This is no way to build a business, @sundarpichai and @SusanWojcicki."
I love @YouTube and put a music video on there the other day... how can this be happening? I don’t want my fans or anyone to be funding hate or violence. https://t.co/oNEhKkjBsp
— Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) January 16, 2021
During an interview with DJ Zane Lowe for Apple Music, Gomez outlined why she's chosen to call out Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, among others, for their inaction when it comes to the spreading of misinformation.
"I think that I started with reaching out to people immediately, directly," she said. "I wasn't afraid to call out a Mark Zuckerberg or to speak what I wanted to speak, because I could not handle what I was seeing. And already we're getting progress, I can tell, with Facebook and stuff like that. But for me, I can't stand the fact that people have to know that they're are neo-Nazi groups online, and that there's hate groups online, and misinformation from the US voting to the COVID virus. It's just, they're not allowed to do that. This is supposed to be a place where people share their life, but not to create hate, and to hurt people. And you know what? Hurt people hurt people. And I just think that's what the bottom line is. I get very passionate about it, so I can get pretty heated, but I just think that it's necessary to call the people out who are responsible, but at the same time, being able to do what I can."
Gomez spoke with Lowe upon the release of her first Spanish single, "De Una Vez" ("At Once"), which came out this week. She released the video for "De Una Vez" on YouTube, as she mentioned in her tweet.
"This has been something I've wanted to do for 10 years, working on a Spanish project, because I'm so, so proud of my heritage, and just genuinely felt like I wanted this to happen," she told Lowe. "And it happened, and I feel like it's the perfect timing. Just with all the division in the world, there's something about Latin music that globally just makes people feel things, you know?"