Is Vimeo Quasi-Censoring LGBT Videos?

A reader named Andy wrote to alert me to the fact that Vimeo -- the second-largest video sharing service on the Internet -- suddenly and inexplicably no longer allows users to search for the terms "gay," "lesbian" and "queer." He contacted them and was brushed off with a response that "one-word searches don't usually work ... try something more specific." While this is true -- "gay pride" and "gay film" both work -- Andy tells me that up until four days ago, he was able to search gay, lesbian and queer with no problem. Now, nothing.

"It is very odd. Maybe it isn't deliberate but what else could it be? You can search for any other single term and get results -- pick anything. Two words work, but not just gay, and that makes my searching a heck of a lot harder. It was so easy just to search 'gay' every day and find the two dozen or so new videos uploaded with that tag, some of which were quite good," Andy wrote me.

He noticed that single word searches like "sex" and "tits" also deliver no results, and now we're left wondering if someone at Vimeo decided to go through the database to eliminate naughty words and threw "gay," "lesbian" and "queer" in with the bunch. (This would not be cool.)

I've reached out to Vimeo for more clarification. I will keep you posted.

UPDATE: Heard back from Steve Niebauer at Vimeo who says this was "an error" in their search. Everything has been corrected now -- so not sure if this was any deliberate act or not, but Steve apologized for the problem and everything is working like before now, so kudos!