Counter Culture Comments

Commentary on pop culture, technology, and society. The official blog of Counter Points Media.

This is an edited version of the transcript for Counter Points Media's video 'YouTube Must Die.' The information might be old or outdated, and the author might not hold the same opinion today.

YouTube Must Die on BitChute

YouTube Must Die on YouTube

Things are getting out of hand. I usually don't make commentary videos, but this is starting to tick me off, and making me upset. It’s one thing to hear about censorship, and another thing for a YouTuber to speak out for himself regarding the attacks he or she has recieved from YouTube. I didn’t pay it much mind, until I realized that not one, but two of my favorite YouTubers have been targeted by YouTube for censorship.

Of course, this is nothing new. Story after story about YouTube's policies have been miffing me since around 2016, when YouTube decided to change the way videos are picked for the Trending section. They decided to handpick the videos for the Trending section, instead of allowing it to populate organically according to the algorithm they’d crafted. It was working just fine, but they didn’t like the videos making the list. They now use the Trending section to show a mixture of popular videos and leftist videos, even if they have few plays relative to the other content on the list.

YouTube's own page confirms that they no longer display videos on the list due solely to popularity.

In fact, they contradict themselves. They say “Trending helps viewers see what’s happening on YouTube and in the world.” Additionally, they say they don't include “clickbaity” or “sensational” content. But that's the name of the game on YouTube, you make sensational, clickbaity content so people watch it. If it's actually good, people will share it, watch it, it gets viewed, but it won't get featured. Why? Oh, it's clickbait, it's sensational. This is ridiculous. They don't even enforce it. Here's a screenshot I took on my phone of the trending list, featuring a video with a sensational title.

“Ultimate Pizza Styles Taste Test” by Good Mythical Morning. It says it's “ultimate”, but there's no way to prove that it's actually ultimate, so that makes the video either misleading or sensational. But it's RIGHT HERE!

Here's another one, “Apple Airpods Buyers Need To See This!” by Unbox Therapy. They don't literally need to see that. They'll be fine if they don't. That's both sensational and misleading. It’s also trending.

Obviously they’re partial; they’ll only apply these rules if the content is political. However, they don’t stop there, this gets much worse.

Notable Youtuber and talk show host Steven Crowder revealed that YouTube had been treating him unfairly, effectively causing his videos to be censored and banned in public places as well as to YouTube users who were either underage or lacking YouTube accounts.

Additionally, his videos at the time were apparently hidden from view during search results, somewhat reminiscent of Twitter’s far more recent DFQ feature.

He’s also had his videos excluded from the trending list, despite having gotten more views in a shorter period of time than many of the others. His videos were shadowbanned and excluded from promotion, despite being extremely popular.

This is already getting worse as I speak.

YouTube recently made moves to hide content they deem “controversial”, using language so vague it’s quite obvious they’re getting ready to start censoring content along ideological lines.

It didn’t stop with Crowder. Prager U is a YouTube channel that created commentary videos attacking popular, mainstream progressive political policies. Their YouTube channel has been repeatedly targeted by YouTube as well.

Then in August of 2018, Alex Jones, a far-right conspiracy theorist, had his entire Infowars network deplatformed from multiple websites, including YouTube. Before that, he was already being targeted by YouTube.

In November, one of my other favorite YouTube channels, 1791l, alerted their viewers that YouTube had stopped sending their subscribers notifications, or just plain unsubbing them. This came after they revealed that in May YouTube not only de-monetized them, they refused to communicate with them over the issue. This left them to move to other spaces to profit from the videos they make.

The list of YouTube martyrs burns big and bright like a neon sign, and is longer than a Paul Ryan filibuster. An edgy comedian YouTuber who goes by the name Mumkey Jones was banned from the platform as well. The ironic thing is, the grounds for the deletion of his channel, promotion of acts of violence, even though in fact he was mocking them, this did not apply to a seperate video, which went viral. The infamous Suicide Forest video by Logan Paul.

This is indicative of YouTube’s censorship emphasis. A video satirizing a shooting would be considered political, in the current cultural climate we live in, since every time there’s a shooting it gets blamed on either guns laws, or the lack thereof, and politicians tend to catch to fall for the tragic event. Suicide, however, is not a politicized issue. Suicide isn’t viewed as a conservative issue, or a liberal issue. It’s just viewed as a human issue.

YouTube’s also gone after creators, not for content that they’ve created, but comments left on their content! This is downright disturbing, because a content creator cannot control the comments left on their content. This is highlighted by the nasty comments Trump gets sent daily on his daily tweets.

Sasha Second has also been censored from YouTube for his journalism.

The far-right identitarian YouTube channel Red Ice TV is also being censored by YouTube for their racist content.

It’s not that I support racism, it’s that I support free speech. If an idea, like all men being created equal, is a good enough idea, it should be allowed to stand on its own two feet without its opposition being shut down. If you have to shut up the people you’re talking to in order to win the argument, you’re probably wrong.

Besides, some of their content which is not racist has still gotten strikes from YouTube.

Moving on, another YouTuber, EmpLemon had his videos about the 2017 YouTube Rewind heavily censored from suggestion feeds.

This isn’t just YouTube trying to drown out conservative voices, although that is likely one of their goals. They’ve also censored liberal content.

Aaron Wysocki claimed that The Young Turks had at least 500 videos de-monetized overnight. YouTube censorship isn’t an issue that affects just conservatives, it seems that literally no one is safe. That’s why I’m not making this a partisan video, but rather a free speech video.

Furthermore, Nerd City discovered that YouTube was de-emphasizing countless videos of YouTubers trying to convince suicidal viewers not to kill themselves, pro LGBTQIAA content and #metoo videos, because they were labelled as “mature.” This is odd because they just championed those sorts of videos in the latest YouTube rewind.

This brings me to today. I checked my YouTube notifications and I saw that The Hated One, one of my favorite youtube channels, which makes commentary videos centered on online privacy and censorship, released a video called “Youtube staffer killed my video on Australian encryption law”, where he not only claims YouTube unfairly de-monetized his previous video, “This Australian encryption ban is the dumbest law in history”, he actually provides a sizable amount of proof to back up his claims, with stunning detail. This clip is a sizable length as well, so please bear with me.

That was long, but it shows a rare, behind-the-scenes look of just how badly YouTube can treat content creators if they wish to cut off their revenue stream. I was surprised it took this long; The Hated One, while a small channel at around only 55K subscribers at the time of this video compared to my other favorite channels, he’s racked up hundreds of thousands of views on many of videos, and his video promoting DuckDuckGo over Google gained 1.4 million views at the time of this video. Small content creators are not safe from YouTube’s scorn.

This is why YouTube must die. We need a pure, unbiased and pro-free speech platform for sharing videos. Unfortunately, that will be an uphill battle for a long time because of the strength on YouTube’s content. Not only is there a vast amount of excellent content currently being made, but there is still an extensive back catalog of classic videos from years ago. Any new service will have to fight against that content. Also, the YouTube killer will have to get their name out there. Being the best video sharing platform means nothing if no one will visit it, and no one will visit it if they haven’t heard of it. Censored YouTubers are already saying that they plan to make their own YouTube alternative.

However this just muddies the waters and splits the viewership between the alternative video platforms, leaving no clear winner. However, there is one thing that can destroy YouTube: YouTube itself.

You see, if YouTube identifies to themselves with the left, particularly the far left, after awhile they will have to start going after liberal creators as well, since they will dissent with the more radical positions of the progressive movement.

This has already happened with a YouTuber named David Rubin. In 2018, his video “Socialism Isn’t Cool” got demonetized. After he learned about it, he reuploaded it with the title “Capitalism Isn’t Cool” and that video remained monetized. While he doesn’t support Socialism and is a fan of free speech, he actually doesn’t call himself a conservative, and identifies himself with the Democrat party. In fact, he used to be a host on The Young Turks.

If YouTube continues to do this sort of thing for long enough, the content creators will eventually get fed up and leave for another service, and once a popular YouTuber does this, perhaps ones with thousands of subscribers like Steven Crowder and PewDiePie, their fans will flock to that service, and YouTube will be dealt the first of many death blows, and ironically it will be dealt by YouTube themselves.

But sadly, there isn’t much we can do to expedite the birth of competition in the video sharing space until YouTube makes this move. The smartest thing for content creators to do is diversify their content, putting it one as many sites as possible. If one of those sites gets popular, users stopping by for PewDiePie videos may find your videos next, and you might gain a larger following as well. Until then, there isn’t much for us to do but be patient, and wait for YouTube’s inevitable self-inflicted wound.

Written by Casey Rollins.

@realcaseyrollins@qoto.org

@realcaseyrollins@civiq.social

@thecaseyrollins on Twitter

On December 11, 2019, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter announced that he'd hired a team of five engineers to look into a method that could be used to decentralize Twitter. The announcement piqued the interest of many in the Fediverse, especially considering that Jack claimed that joining an existing protocol would be his preference, saying "we’d like this team to either find an existing decentralized standard they can help move forward, or failing that, create one from scratch".

While many have been calling for a decentralized internet, the online community now seems hesitant over the prospect. The question remains as to whether or not this move will benefit Twitter, the decentralized community, the public at large, all of the above, or no one at all. Of course, as with most technologies, it matters not that it's used, but rather how, and how others respond to its use.

The answer heavily depends on whether or not the Bluesky team decides to go with ActivityPub and/or Mastodon, or build out their own protocol. Since Gab moved from their own, centralized system to a Mastodon-based infrastructure, one can reasonably expect that Bluesky could successfully port Twitter into the Fediverse in a similar manner, especially considering that they have a far larger budget as well as a much larger dev team.

In fact, Twitter doesn't even have to adopt existing open source software to build their platform. They could write their own code to connect to the ActivityPub protocol, like Gab did. Other developers in the community have done the same, as evidenced by creation of other ActivityPub clients such as Pleroma and Misskey.

If they decide to use ActivityPub, the rest of the Fediverse will be able to interact with Twitter users. What software they end up using, in the grand scheme of things, is pretty much irrelevant. What does matter is how they plan to position Twitter within the Fediverse.

Dorsey seems to want Twitter to become the standard of whatever ecosytem it leaps into, which begs the question, what role would Twitter hold in such an environment, and what would they do with their newfound power? Some have cause for concern. After all, no one uses the Fediverse because of their love of Twitter; many have myriads of problems with the company and/or site, valid or not. Some feel that the Twitter community is to confrontational and toxic. Others argue that it has far too much censorship. Then others have huge problems with how they make money, by collecting user data and selling it.

If Twitter grabs a foothold in the Mastodon community, this could spell trouble for the Fediverse culture as it stands today. No one can outright force an instance to follow certain rules, but there are indications that admins of mainstream instances may be ready to fall in line with collective guidelines. The de facto homepage of Mastodon, Join Mastodon, already has a set of guidelines and rules observed by multiple instances, the Mastodon Server Covenant. This could indicate that most Mastodon admins wouldn't mind following in the footsteps and advice of a leader like Twitter. Some users and admins of smaller instances have already expressed concern that the site features server guidelines (which, by the way, all recommended instances on the website must abide by to remain recommended), but they seem to have very little influence, which in itself might indicate something worrying about Twitter's potential power.

However, Twitter joining the Fediverse might have some positives. Twitter joining the Fediverse opens popular figures, including politicians and the mass media, to a wider audience, allowing even more people to confront them and hold them accountable. This could also mean that, should Bluesky choose to take a similar route as Gab, its software would be open source and available to use on other instances, increasing the diversity of experience across the Fediverse. Additionally, it gives Twitter users a viable way to leave Twitter for the Fediverse without losing all of their data and having to manually follow back users one used to follow while on Twitter.

Of course, there's the possibility that Bluesky creates a new protocol, which could cause more fragmentation, and give Twitter even more power over the new community.

At the end of the day, it is up to you to decide whether or not Project Bluesky is even something you want to happen. The project has its share of pros and cons, and the lack of publicly disclosed information about it gives us little to go on when forming opinions on the topic. That said, it is important to be vocal about the project, especially considering that Bluesky is in its infancy. Contact your Fediverse admin, or the higher-ups at Twitter and Bluesky. Ask them questions and let them know your feelings about this new plan. After all, Project Bluesky just might shape the future of social media.

Written by Casey Rollins.

@realcaseyrollins@qoto.org

@realcaseyrollins@civiq.social

@thecaseyrollins on Twitter