YouTube Deletes Channels, Demonetizes and Censors Content and Refuses to Respond to Press
Sadistic YouTube
Deletes Channels, Demonetizes and Censors Content and Refuses to Respond to
Press
BY MEGAN FOX APRIL 4, 2018
The news that a
content creator who was demonetized and censored by YouTube snapped and went homicidal at the
company's headquarters points to an ugly, systemic problem.
YouTube creators have been asking for over a year for YouTube to communicate
honestly and fairly with its creators, demanding an explanation for why some
channels are demonetized and others with similar content aren't.
Here's a recent example: Mandy O'Brien
has a popular body language channel on YouTube with over two hundred thousand
subscribers. She's funny and smart and provides good insight into human
behavior. While she seems to like Trump, her videos are not terribly political.
Most of them center around breaking news stories and reading the unspoken
communications given off by interviewees on the news.
Her channel, Bombard's Body Language, was
targeted for deletion by YouTube. It all began after the Parkland school
shooting, when O'Brien made a video about the body language of the
untouchable David Hogg. The video was deleted by YouTube for
"bullying," but still exists on Vimeo. The strange part is, she is
debunking the conspiracy theory that a reporter was telling Hogg what to say.
O'Brien's conclusion is that Hogg's
social and emotional immaturity (because he is still a developing minor) leads
to his halting speech and mistakes -- which is completely normal for a teen his
age. She believes he was not coached but that he isn't as good of a speaker as
we've been led to believe and he needs to practice before he speaks.
This video was flagged as
"bullying," giving her channel one strike. Shortly after, another
video of a Parkland shooting witness was flagged for the same issue. The most
controversial thing O'Brien said in this video is that the teen is emotionally
immature, which makes her smile under stress. O'Brien was defending the
students she was accused of bullying! Strike two.
Then, in a bizarre twist, they flagged an old video she had made of an
Australian woman accused of drug smuggling because O'Brien called her
"stupid." This was the third strike and O'Brien's channel was
deleted.
She fought the deletion and YouTube
reinstated her channel without the David Hogg video, but republished the other
two. They offered no explanation for the change of heart. PJM reached out to YouTube
several times for a comment on this situation and received no response. It's
unknown why YouTube has an email address for press to contact them when they do
not respond to it. Not even Facebook is this bad at public relations. (In fact,
Facebook is the best of the social media giants in responding to press.)
YouTube's continued refusal to publicly
address these deletions, bannings, and demonetizations has led to seething
anger among content creators and subscribers, which may have now spilled over
into homicidal behavior by Nasim Aghdam (we don't yet know for certain what
Aghdam's motive was).
While there is never an excuse for shooting
innocent people, Aghdam's frustration with YouTube highlights ongoing problems
that must be addressed by the company: mass deletions, loss of livelihood, and
censorship. They seem to think they don't have to answer to anyone, including
the press, about the asinine business decisions they keep making that suppress
the First Amendment and oppress their own content creators.
Most people like O'Brien (who are sane
and normal) take their content elsewhere, like to Vimeo and Bitchute, but
the psychological games YouTube plays with them are maddening! Deleting videos,
then reinstating, demonetizing then remonetizing... this goes on and on with no
reasonable explanation.
Robots send form letters informing you
of your disappearing videos. Despite the fact there's an entire office building
full of people at YouTube, there are no people ever available to talk about how
your channel may have been caught up in an algorithm it shouldn't have been in.
Years of your work then disappears and no one at YouTube cares to investigate
why or communicate with you about what happened. It's sadistic.
YouTube has a terrible business model that
treats its content creators (and the Constitution) like garbage. It should be
abandoned en masse and investigated.
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