Google's YouTube censorship practices have increased since the election of President Trump, to the point where their liberal "flaggers" are able to get videos removed from the public eye, demonetized, and in many cases creators' entire channels completely disappear in restricted mode when reporting on the very same topics the MSM does, just not toeing their "official" narrative.
YOUTUBE ALLOWING 'FLAGGER' ABUSE OF THE SYSTEM TO CENSOR CERTAIN VIEWS
We will start with the latest example of YouTube allowing their "flaggers" or even worse, their "bots" to determine what gets seen and what doesn't according to ideology, rather than "community guidelines."
Before showing the latest example, let's look at who the these "flaggers" are, compared to YouTube claims. In 2014, it was revealed that not only does YouTube have what they call a "global community of volunteer contributors," given the ability to flag videos as inappropriate, or having violated some community guideline, but they also have "super-flaggers," which includes "Around 200 people and organizations," given the ability to "flag up to 20 videos at once," supposedly to be "reviewed by YouTube staff." (Sources - CNet, WSJ, Financial Times)
On YouTube's own page, they claim: "*Please note that flagged videos do not automatically get removed. We have trained internal teams, fluent in multiple languages, who carefully evaluate your flags 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year in time zones around the world."
Lets put that myth about videos being "reviewed" before being removed, right now.
Mark Dice, with over one million subscribers, recently had a video of his titled "This is CNN," showing a number of embarrassing CNN clips, publishing his video at a time where the news organization has been engulfed in a number of controversies, including publishing a fake news story that had to be deleted, retracted, apologized for and resulted in three high profile employees being forced to resign.
Someone did not like CNN's own idiocy being exposed by Dice, so they "flagged" his video and YouTube put it on private and locked it there, so that no one could see the video. Dice revealed what they had done publicly on Twitter highlighting @TeamYouTube, which is their social media account. The result was they restored his video after "reviewing" it, which begs the questions, 1)Who flagged it? 2)Why was it locked on private in the first place? 3)Had Dice not had a slew of followers nailing TeamYouTube on social media, making their unethical practices very public, would it have been restored?
Dice explains below:
I feel I can safely make the assertion that YouTube is also allowing their liberal "flaggers" or "bots"to have videos demonetized also, simply because said video offended them or hurt their little feelings or programming, without the video in question even being reviewed by a human being that is part of YouTube's staff. I can make this assertion because of the multiple instances where we have monetized a video, then at a later date, after ads had been running on it for some time, someone would "flag it" and then I would get notified by YouTube that the video was "not" approved for monetization because it was not "advertiser friendly."
How do I know it was not reviewed by YouTube staff before they stripped monetization? Because after I appealed the demonetization, then they reviewed it, and approved it saying, why yes, it is advertiser friendly, meaning it did comply "with YouTube’s Terms of Service and Community Guidelines," and was "eligible for advertising."
Just a couple examples shown below to prove my point and please note the subject matter, where in each case, they were flagged for ideology not guidelines, nor advertiser unfriendly content, there was no nudity, no cussing, no sexual content and no incitement to violence and violated none of YouTube's terms or community guidelines as evidenced by the reversal after someone finally reviewed it.
After flagging: Results after YouTube staff actually does review the video:
Another that was demonetized because someone flagged it, then after appeal was found be advertiser friendly after all.
Rather than going on providing a screen shot of each and every email individually, let me just show how often these flaggers or bots harass video creators and how YouTube continues to allow it:
Note- In some of those emails, 5 or 6 videos were demonetized at once (some of them had already been up and monetized for years), with a list that I then had to go through one by one to appeal separately.
YouTube's so-called flaggers are abusing the system and have been for years, yet YouTube does nothing to correct this issue, allows them to continue to harass video creators simply because their ideology is different than those given the right to flag videos for YouTube. According to some, they have also set up bots to flag content, yet who sets the bots algorithms which seems to "flag" content that violates no gudelines?
Restricted Mode- Another part of the 'Adpocalypse' includes YouTube's decision to flag all of a channels videos when in restricted mode. In other words if someone has their browser set to restricted mode to avoid pornography, sexual content, cursing, violence, the videos of the flagged channel will not show in their feeds and cannot be searched for because they will not appear in the results. For ANP this has been happening since early 2017 (coincidentally after the presidential election where YouTube's parent company Google, had pushed for a Clinton win)
In March I showed, in the video below, how our videos disappear when I set my browser to restricted mode. Note that our videos contain any nudity, violence, pornography, cursing or any other content that would have us flagged in restricted mode. In fact, many of the videos you will see on our channel deal with the exact same issues that MSM channels deal with, yet those channels are not flagged in restricted mode.
LAWSUIT AGAINST YOUTUBE
On July 17, 2017, it was reported that James Sweet and Chuck Meré, the Arkansas-based creators behind the Zombie Go Boom YouTube channel, which has over 1.6 million subscribers, is suing YouTube, after seeing their revenue drop from "$10,000 to $15,000 per month (which comes out to about $333 to $500 per day) on ads before YouTube updated its safeguards, to $20 to $40 per day.
Sweet and Meré’s lawsuit, according to MediaPost, is targeting California’s unfair competition law. The two creators hope that they can compel YouTube to reveal the specifics of its algorithms. "YouTube has a duty to disclose, with detailed specificity and complete transparency, the terms by which content is selected or deselected for monetization," reads the complaint. "Failing to disclose this essential information to content providers, along with maintaining unilateral control to change the terms and conditions which govern the payment received by content providers for their creative work is anti-competitive, harmful to the creative content market, and also a breach of good faith and fair dealing."
BOTTOM LINE
A simple search at YouTube for "YouTube demonetization" brings up 277,000 results, showing that despite YouTube's assurances that they are working on this issue, nothing is being done as video creator after video creator is having their channels penalized for no good cause. While we fully admit that some channels do use extreme content, and perhaps are not advertiser friendly, our own experiences as well as other website owners in the Independent News media shows that in most these cases, guidelines are not being violated, but creators are being punished by flaggers or "bots" on a regular basis in an all-out attack against Independent Media.
YouTube is not the only social media platform that has increased their censorship practices, Twitter and Facebook are also under fire for the censorship, but the spotlight right now is on YouTube.
Below, SGTReport explains that on July 6th he received a STRIKE against his You Tube account for an interview he did with researcher Sofia Smallstorm. He uploaded that interview and posted it to You Tube ... 22 MONTHS AGO. As he explains, there was no violence, cursing, harassment or anything contained within the video that violated YouTube's community standard guidelines.
The bottom line here is that the big tech companies like Google, using their YouTube platform and their Adsense program, along with other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, are trying to kill Independent Media in order to give control of information back to the establishment mainstream media.
If they can bankrupt Independent news sites, then all that will be left is the MSM spin, and that is the whole purpose of the "adpocalypse."
