Censorship on YouTube: Wave or Glitch?

Reflections on YouTube's recent banning and un-banning of critical news and geopolitics channels.

Over the past several weeks, we have seen something quite unsettling to many news and geopolitics creators across YouTube and to me personally. An unprecedented wave of channel removals, all of which were “dissident voices” in one form or another.

Don’t get me wrong, critical creators have been thrown off YouTube before. Most famously, the entire Russia Today (RT) network and, sometime later, Scott Ritter. But those happened at some distance from each other and the RT removal was also directly linked to state action in the US and Europe that made the distribution of the Russian viewpoint in these allegedly free societies illegal.

What we saw over the last few weeks was different. It felt like an ongoing purge that “weeded out” big and small channels with content criticizing the Ukraine Proxy War and the Genocide in Gaza.

What happened?

First, we had the deletion of African Stream about 3 weeks ago. Then came the news that

DD Geopolitics

, and

The Real Politick with Mark Sleboda

were gone, and on the morning of October 4, I suddenly had an email from my friend and colleague,

Glenn Diesen

, in my inbox that said

I was just removed from YouTube due to "hate speech" with no examples or warning. I am sure no such examples exists as I have not uttered any hate, but there seems to be a purge (…). They began with Alex Jones, but eventually they will come for you too.

Two days later,

Rachel Blevins

posted on Twitter/X that her account, too, had been deleted for alleged hate speech. Without any proof or example. The channels were just “permanently deleted", the mail from the YouTube overlords said.

It had always been clear to me that our YouTube channels were just a checkbox away from oblivion. Just a tick in an Excel spreadsheet and we would be gone. There are no legal rights on YouTube, there is no judicial process, there are just the “Terms and Conditions” and the judgment of the automized YouTube algorithms to decide what happens. In 3 years on the platform, I’ve never interacted with a single human. The only time I got someone to help me was when I had an issue with my Google account, but the person on the othere side was the Google customer support, not a YouTube person.

As creators, we are administered by a completely anonymous IT system that in its emails pretends to “be happy” for us, or “have concerns” but, in actuality, is just automated speech to administer the people who upload stuff. Even with over 100k subscribers, there is no personalized help. After all, the platform has over 300k such channels—the size of a small city. YouTube prefers not to get dragged into the weeds of dealing with all these creators. So, no human interaction for us. Just dystopian email communications and occasional blue buttons to request reviews which then again come back as automated replies.

And legally, what would we do? Where would we even begin trying to sue the platform? Google’s headquarters are in Ireland, its main operation is in the US, we are located all over the globe, and the thing has the budget of a mid-sized nation. Plus, it’s a private enterprise that has the right to choose with who it does business and with who not. Fighting against Google over being deleted would be a gigantic act with highly unsure outcomes, even if there were deep pockets available to fund a lawsuit. There is almost nothing we little ones on the ground can do if YouTube decides to delete us. We can only lick our wounds and move on to other platforms. At least, so I thought.

And then, they were back

As soon as I got the email from Glenn, I scheduled a talk with him to discuss what happened, as I wanted to distribute his experience as quickly as possible, fearing that my own channel might be only weeks or days away from the chopping block. After all, our content was quite similar, and our understanding of the world, too. So it would only make sense that Neutrality Studies, too, would be gone. We said we gonna talk on Tuesday, October 8, my evening, his morning.

And then, the big surprise. As we go online on zoom, the first thing Glenn tells me is that “I’m sorry,I think I’m ruining the topic of your show today. YouTube readmitted my channel an hour ago.” What?!?

I was so happy! Glenn was back. You can watch the full conversation with him here, where he also explains the process he went through. By now, also Rachel Blevins, Mark Sleboda, and DD_Geopolitics have been readmitted to YouTube.

Insights

So, what was this all about? Was it a glitch? Glenn and I talk about this possibility in the video and how important it is not to jump to conclusions too quickly or blame malevolent forces where simple mistakes might have been made. But how would we know? It might also have been a censorship wave in the making but then someone at Google got second thoughts and reversed the decision.

However, I also got a comment from one of my viewers that one of his favorite cooking shows on YouTube had been deleted for several days before coming back online (although I cannot independently confirm this), which again is rather an indicator of a glitch, not intentional censorship.

Whatever was behind this, there are a few things that make the episode truly odd, but a learning experience on alternative media platforms. First, it shows their absolute power. While Glenn and the others have been reinstated, African Stream—probably the largest of the channels and the first one to be removed—remains banned. African Stream is also the one channel that was singled out by self-proclaimed “Disinformation Experts” as “Russian Propaganda” and ultimately even the State Department chimed in with Tony Blinken claiming that

RT also secretly runs the online platform African Stream across a wide range of social media platforms. Now, according to the outlet’s website, “African Stream is” – and I quote – “a pan-African digital media organisation based exclusively on social-media platforms, focused on giving a voice to all Africans both at home and abroad.”  In reality, the only voice it gives is to Kremlin propagandists.

Shortly after this announcement, African Stream got banned and the glitch/purge of critical geopolitics channels began. That was the main reason why we were all afraid that this was a coordinated affair to take down voices from YouTube that don’t go along with either the Russia or Israel narratives on Mainstream Media.

Second, the episode also shows the manipulative way in which these corporations deploy language not only against customers, but creators, too. The emails that Glenn and the others received said the deletion was permanent and that they could not come back to the platform. But then, the “permanent” part was only as permanent as the checkbox in the spreadsheet. The channel was not really deleted, just deactivated and the overlords made it re-appear again as soon as something changed in the background. One would think the term “deleted” means “completely erased”. But, as it seems, it means “deactivated” while the servers actually still save the content. Big tech can lie to your face and there is no way for us to check.

Third, the rules are not really the rules. While Google says that its actions are governed by its terms and conditions, it in fact does what it pleases. There is a “3 strike system” on YouTube, in which the platform singles out individual videos that violate their policies (be it hate speech, copyright, or others), and strikes the channel with upload banns for one or two weeks. The idea is that those punishments serve as warnings not to repeat the action. I always thought that this was the worst that could happen, that a video would get struck. But nope. Turns out, YouTube reserves the right to completely digress from its system and act however it wants. The rules only apply one way around. Seems that the “Rules Based Order” in the digital realm is just as arbitrary as the one in international politics.

Lastly—and this should come as no surprise—it drives home the need for diversification of our content across platforms. Since any single social medium might go crazy overnight or be taken down by sovereign authorities (the 2020 Parler app example comes to mind), the only solution is to post content in different corners of the internet, as backups and to make sure that things remain available and accessible somewhere.

This last point is not gonna be easy, since diversification needs time and effort. But I hope that there are brilliant programmers out there who will help us soon by developing something like “email clients for social media publishing” through which especially we free-speech-minded folks can cross-post to different platforms in writing, video, or audio, in a simple but secure way and manage the duplication in posting and uploading.

This was an instructive episode, and I hope the readmissions mean that our content remains tolerated by YouTube for the foreseeable future. After all, it remains an important platform even just for the visibility and discoverability of our work. Sadly, African Stream seems not to be getting this tolerance after all (please support their work directly through their homepage: africanstream.media).

We definitely need to think ahead to tackle this Sword of Damocles above all our heads.

All the best,

Pascal

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