Maurits Vande Reyde wrote that the podcast *Het Wassalon*, for which he claimed 800,000 euros had been allocated, was stopped after 342,619 euros had been spent. He stated that Minister Caro Gennez had initially called the podcast a success because it had reached 1.2 million views, translating that as one in five Flemish people having seen the podcast. According to Vande Reyde, the reach was partly due to 64,000 euros being spent on Meta ads. He argued that views alone said nothing about the impact of a campaign and questioned whether the podcast had actually contributed to the acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals or to the sense of societal acceptance among people with disabilities. He cited an ad that led to an inclusive vocabulary list from Cavaria, featuring terms like “allosexual,” “amatonormativity,” “androphilia,” and “gray asexual.” Vande Reyde criticized the way the government evaluated campaigns, subsidies, and structures like service vouchers, claiming that standards were always found to label such initiatives as successful without determining what had actually changed. Regarding the cessation, he wrote that Gennez attributed it to hate and polarization caused by disinformation, mainly from the parliament, and that she referenced him in that context. Vande Reyde found that reasoning incorrect and stated that Sammy Mahdi, Ben Weyts, Melissa Depraetere, and others in the Flemish podcast world had also criticized the project the previous summer. He argued that the fiasco would yield no lessons and predicted that another useless subsidy would follow. #politiek #socialeimpact #mediaevalutie (translated)
