YouTube is setting creators up to ban them, and I can prove it.

Because it happened to me.

I know the exact date that YouTube started messing with my channel - it was August 26, 2020. My YouTube channel grew rapidly, hitting 100K subscribers in less than a year. There were days I would get more than 1,000 new subscribers a day, very consistently, every day for months…until August 26.

That’s when everything slowed to a crawl. YouTube stopped serving my content to people who weren’t already subscribed to my channel. In the last year, my channel has barely grown at all.

Here’s analytics from July 2020. Notice that 60% of the people watching my channel were unsubscribed, giving the channel a way to grow into a new audience:

And the same analytics from a year later.

Without new people coming to your content, it makes it near impossible to grow. Of course, YouTube knows that.

They also started unsubscribing people from my channel. Every single day, YouTube unsubscribes dozens of people from my channel in batches. I can watch it happen in real time. Finally, last week I decided to ask my audience on other social platforms if they had been unsubscribed. I heard from dozens of people who reported to me that YouTube had unsubscribed them. Here are a few examples:

Every single time I ask YouTube about this, they say they are merely cleaning up bot and inactive accounts. Do these people look like bots to you?

Make no mistake, I have it easier than most. 100,000 people is still a lot of subscribers. I kept going, spreading hours creating content almost every single day. YouTube is not the main source of my income, but it is a nice chunk of it, and they constantly hold this power over the heads of their creators to censor us to make us bend the knee to their anti-science, anti-logic rules.

And they look for any reason to penalize creators who dare to defy them or the narrative they are pushing onto the public.

The first strike I got on YouTube was a few months ago. My crime? I read a peer-reviewed article in a major psychology journal about the psychological impact of wearing masks.

I’m a psychologist. The interns at YouTube can even call me Dr. Borysenko if it helps to reinforce the point.

But it doesn’t matter if you are a literal expert in the field you are discussing. I was deemed guilty of spreading medical misinformation and was banned from uploading and posting for a week, losing all the revenue in the process.

But the latest ban I received this week is even more absurd.

I do a stream on Sunday evenings called “Effed Up News of the Week" in which I cover a series of news stories I missed during the week. This past Sunday, I covered an article from The Hill about the University of Virginia disenrolling unvaccinated students.

Nothing pisses off YouTube more than when you expose shady nonsense around vaccines, but since I wasn’t encouraging people not to get the vaccine (I believe it should be everyone’s choice) I thought it would probably be ok.

When I finished the stream, I noticed it had been demonetized mid-stream (which regularly happens due to automation), but I decided to request a human review of the stream.

The next morning, I woke up to this email stating that a human at YouTube had manually reviewed the stream and approved it for monetization, meaning everything I said on the stream was well within YouTube’s guidelines:

Believing I was in the clear, I proceeded to make clips from the hour-long stream and post them in shorter segments. There were exactly no changes made to the content that had already been reviewed by a human at YouTube and manually approved.

One of the clips I created was the article I mentioned earlier about the University of Virginia disenrolling unvaccinated students. Within minutes of me posting the clip - a clip containing content they had already manually reviewed and approved - I was issued a second strike on my channel and was banned from posting or streaming for two weeks. One more strike, and my channel will be removed entirely.

You can view the clip they banned here, in my Locals community.

Here’s the kicker: The original stream INCLUDING the content from this clip that YouTube deems so dangerous is STILL live on my channel and STILL monetized. You can see for yourself here. Here is proof that it is still monetized (that’s what the green circle means):

The only way I have to get questions answered from YouTube directly is through their Twitter account. After three days, the account still refuses to answer questions about how content that underwent a human review and was approved for monetization could have been issued a strike following that human review.

I am still banned form posting, uploading content, and streaming, costing me thousands of dollars of income over the two weeks.

So to recap:

1. I read an article about a public, land grant university disenrolling students who are unvaccinated.

2. A human being at YouTube manually reviewed that content and decided I followed all of their guidelines and it was suitable for monetization.

3. After I received the notification declaring the content had been approved from a human at YouTube, I edited the content into several smaller clips without changing any of the substance.

4. YouTube issued me a second strike on my channel and banned me from posting for two weeks for one of those clips, the content of which they had already approved via human review.

5. YouTube refuses to answer questions about why content that was approved by human review was issued a strike. They have yet to even acknowledge that the content previously underwent human review prior to my posting the clip they banned.

6. YouTube refuses to remove the strike, costing me two weeks of income and putting my channel at risk of being removed entirely.

Seems a bit like YouTube is setting up content creators they don’t like to ban them off their platform under the guise of “medical misinformation.”

I’m lucky. As I stated earlier, I don’t make most of my income from YouTube. I was an early adopter of Dave Rubin’s Locals platform and have been able to build a robust community there that supports my work. Unlike YouTube, Locals never censors content that doesn’t fit its political narrative.

However, most creators aren’t that lucky. There are currently very few viable platforms for them to go to. Sure, there are YouTube alternatives but not a single one of them provides anywhere near the income that YouTube does when you’re not being censored.

And YouTube knows that. This is why they believe they can get away with it.

Truth be told, they probably will get away with it, because people are so apathetic about tech censorship that they barely notice anymore. Our elected representatives have done absolutely nothing to reform section 230, leaving us all in a state where we are at the whim of whatever political story big tech wants us to believe at any given time. This is a clear example of YouTube acting as a publisher, not a platform, and blatantly contradicting its own rules. And the government is providing them protection to do this.

There is no doubt in my mind that my channel will be banned by YouTube at some point. It’s inevitable. And if you think I’m the only person this is happening to, I have a bridge to sell you.

In the meantime, I’m still posting in my Locals. If you’d like to support the work I’m doing, and see not safe for YouTube videos, make sure to join me. And if you can join as a supporter at the monthly or annual level, or make a one-time donation, that will help balance out the income that YouTube has cost me over the next two weeks. It will also unlock additional perks and exclusive content in the community.

Make sure you are supporting creators you like OUTSIDE of YouTube. It’s the only way forward.

Epilogue

After I published this article, YouTube doubled down like all SJWs do and removed the entire stream that they had previously manually reviewed and previously approved.