The Suicide of YouTube
Safety, security, misinformation and hate speech are obvious cover for politically motivated censorship. For YouTube, colluding with legacy media and purging creators made for a very public suicide.
It had to be done. Too many people were down-voting the shoddy corporate network propaganda performances and the YouTube channels that incessantly pump out the Big Lies. But the removal of the Dislike button is just the latest in a long series of executive follies YouTube has made to destroy itself. It didn’t have to end this way.
For its first ten years online YouTube was one of the best things about the Internet. You could watch old TV episodes like Twilight Zone, listen to rare music albums, or obscure ‘conspiratorial’ documentaries about the Illuminati or find your favorite radio host’s show from that day minutes after it aired. After the unapproved election of Donald Trump in 2016, the Corporate-State information gate keepers sprung into action to coordinate mass censorship of wrong think and YouTube, like other platforms loaded the censorship gun and put it to its own head.
The initial purges were reserved specifically for alternative media sources that questioned the hegemonic power of corporations, corporate media narratives or the corrupt politicians they serve. If they weren’t censored and blacklisted outright like Alex Jones, they were given warnings and strikes to change their tone and chill their speech.
Google’s (YouTube’s parent company) internal post-election company meeting after Trump’s win was a premonition of what was coming. From simply observing the tone and body language of that collective corporate cope-a-thon’s embrace of employee infantilisms and emotional fragility one would be mistaken for assuming an asteroid strike of earth was imminent. For overly-sensitive emotionally-incontinent silicon valley chicken littles, it was much worse than that.
In preparation for the 2018 mid-term elections Silicon Valley platforms partnered with corporate and government funded “independent groups” to appoint themselves arbiters of truth and fact for their users “protection” and “safety” against “misinformation”, “harmful content” and “hate speech”. YouTube’s role was to continue their purges and chilling of speech and to dig its own grave by altering its search engine to only show “authoritative sources” - content that you once went to YouTube to escape. Overnight they shut down the biggest option for alternative and thoughtful viewpoints. If you tried to search for anything remotely political you were met with pages of the uniform drone of corporate nightly news drivel to keep you from devious wrong think. The alphabet “news” agencies, the big five media conglomerates (see image below), state-funded pravda machines (BBC, CBC), failing legacy newspapers and their obnoxious digital partners like Vox, The Young Turks and Buzzfeed commandeered the top ten pages of search results. If you didn’t know what to think or believe before The Great Purge, YouTube was going to show you.
This alteration to the search engine, purging of creators and demonetization of wrong-think content ended up costing Google’s parent company billions in lost advertising revenue the first quarter of 2019 following these policy changes. People didn’t want to search YouTube for a story only to be stuck with NBC Nightly News links or other useless propagandistic takes, so they stopped clicking and the ad revenue collapsed. For Silicon Valley ideologues and their Democrat party allies this was a small price to pay to maintain the “integrity of our democracy” by filtering out “fake news” and “conspiracies” because we all know “Democracy Dies in Darkness”.
This is the common parlance of propagandists and liars working for the Corporate-State power structures:
Censoring Fake news, Misinformation and Conspiracies
Purging Harmful Content and Hate Speech
Under the guise of Community Safety and Protection
For the integrity of Elections and Democracy
By now anyone who’s been paying attention knows the largest purveyors of fake news, misinformation and conspiracies like “Trump-Russia collusion”, WMDs, zoonotic virus origins (etc. infinitum), and more recently 300,000 heart attacks for ‘Post Pandemic Stress Disorder’, are the Corporate-State media apparatus. Anyone paying attention knows the Corporate-State is all for Election integrity and Democracy, so long as the outcome is pre-approved before the people have a chance to decide, and if the people decide on the wrong outcome the Corporate-State will expend all its resources and energy to undermine and delegitimize that choice, maybe even impeach it a few times.
Facebook was eager to boast about partnering with the Obama campaign to help him get elected in 2008 and openly bragged about doing it again in 2012 because…”election integrity and democracy”. In 2016 the Silicon Valley cretins tried to engineer a Hillary Clinton victory, and were shocked when the people didn’t follow their instructions. In the years since, the lies and propaganda from the Corporate media gets worse by the day and the people know it as reflected in polls. The Plandemic has only amplified this awareness exponentially.
Public trust in Corporate Media is at an all time low and plunges to new depths with every public poll and every story covering up pandemic lies. While the institution once known as Journalism is long gone, in its absence people eagerly search and dig for truth wherever their digital journey takes them. Welcome Good Citizens!
Their primary sources were once alternative media content creators on YouTube, now digitally shipwrecked to other platforms - islands for misfit thinkers - replaced by propaganda only from approved diligent and trustworthy Corporate-State functionaries. YouTube has purged itself of all original thinkers. A few remain in isolated corners that require dedicated searching through the algorithmic fog like some amateur treasure hunter without a map. And even these few will be purged when they start making too much noise. The search engine is useless and most of the challenging and thoughtful content is purged within minutes of being posted, resulting in a graveyard of dead links spread across the ether, a sea of digital flotsam.
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
- Yevgeny Zamyatin
Why would anyone with anything remotely important to say on any subject ever consider starting a YT channel when the busy bodies in the YT censorship department can shut them down at any moment with no good reason or justification provided? “You’ve violated our intentionally obscure and vague, selectively enforced policies, created by our not-at-all Orwellian ‘trust and safety council’. Thanks for playing. Goodbye.” Thousands of hours of labor for attention extraction erased forever. Off to start again on another platform where the censors may arrive any day.
Running the risk of offending the woke mob of outraged infants or their censorious allies is not worth one minute of anyone’s time. This has led YouTube to become nothing more than a dumping ground for mediocre thoughtless content that gets pushed behind a search wall of corporate “authoritative” propaganda. In a decade the entire platform will simply be a cesspit of nihilistic mindless vloggers and topic-specific ‘how to’ videos, product reviews, nutty animal videos, pathetic ‘unboxing’ videos and the usual sad mélange of grown men in their home studios opining on various topics they shouldn’t in front of the blue LED glow of kid’s toy action figures aligned neatly on a shelf in their original packaging. Even they too will run afoul the censors when the rare occasional original thought manifested in soundwaves across their overpriced microphones catches the ire of the algorithmic purity Gods.
By 2019 all good alternative media content creators who had spent years building up their subscribers and depending on YT ad revenue for their livelihood were left unemployed and back to square one. In the years since, the YT purging and censorship has become constant, almost a daily ritual, the vast majority of it politically motivated to de-platform anyone with views to the right of Frederic Engels. The most recent victim is Republican congressional candidate Joe Kent of Washington State. Kent is a retired Green Beret and Gold Star husband who devoted 20 years of his life to serving his country in uniform and now wants to take that service to the halls of Congress. He was purged from YouTube in an instant by some gender studies graduate from Barnard who has devoted her life to perusing Tumblr and TikTok.
The little red guard of the Google subsidiary provided their usual justifications for the purge: We know this is probably very upsetting news, but it's our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all. If we think a channel severely violates our policies, we take it down to protect other users on the platform.
Safety and Protection. There you have it. The world we’re living today perfectly expressed by an automated YouTube email to a war veteran guilty of the wrong opinions.
They’re protecting the community and keeping the community safe from…(checks notes)…a retired Green Beret and Gold Star husband running for Congress with the wrong letter next to his name.
YouTube has recently and dutifully extended this censorious courtesy to their Big Pharma allies by axing anyone who dares to question the safety or efficacy of vaccines that have never been through animal testing and are being systematically pumped into the human population of guinea pigs through criminal mandates. Question these Nuremberg code violations, these crimes against humanity and your channel will disappear into the ether. Dare to even mention safe, cheap and effective alternatives to ‘vaccines’ like Ivermectin and you’ll run afoul YouTube’s Corporate-State guide to approved thought. YouTube will justify your wrong-think purge as “keeping the community safe.” Keeping the community safe by…(checks notes)…keeping information about safe, cheap, effective drugs to treat Covid and save lives from the community. Kafka has pissed his grave.
Perhaps its all for the best this suicide of YouTube. It will be necessary for our digital growing pains and a well needed social cleanse. For years ‘YouTube Vlogger’ has been the top reply of children to the famous question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Surely in response to our forever-pandemic world of medical apartheid, and with truthful counsel from parents their answers will alter to something more noble like “honest immunologist” or “A doctor who actually treats patients instead of killing them with Remdesevir and ventilators” or “Full time Q-code saboteur” or “Covid Pass hacker for the resistance.” Yeah, I doubt it too.
Alternative platforms like Rumble are slowly rising up from the ashes of the Great Purge amplifying a balkanizing effect on information and political discourse. Tribes migrating to their corners to nod approvingly of information they already agree with, never being challenged to think beyond their comforting echo chambers.
We can count Substack as an excellent alternative (wouldn’t be here otherwise) that has emerged as a place for words that will challenge younger generation’s educational indoctrination and depleted attention spans. If you’ve made it this far without the aide of dexamfetamine young bucks, congratulations.
But make no mistake, the Corporate-State overlords will come for Substack one day. They’re already taking constant aim in the controlled media. How long can San Francisco based Substack really survive in the heart of the censorious viper’s nest? How long until Substack becomes another Corporatocracy amplification platform captured by the giant media conglomerates who can’t fathom why they’re so despised and ignored by the masses? Looking forward to the coming buzzfeed.substack.com articles like “10 Cute Reasons Why Joe Biden Touches Kids” or donlemon.substack.com on “White Supremacy is The Greatest Threat to Your Health” or rachelmaddow.substack.com articles about Putin hiding in your closet.
When the men in dark suits come knocking for access to the Substack servers to purge us rebels and heretics, please stand up for us. We’re tired of misfit island hopping. The truth needs a digital home. Bon Courage Substack!
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It sure would be a shame if everyone installed a YouTube adblocker and left 50 tabs running 4K videos all night when there computers aren't in use.
Ten years ago the type of censorship that exists now was almost unimaginable. Having access to information and letting people decide for themselves was once the norm and considered the ethical thing to do. Now the paradigm is "protecting" people from non mainstream narratives. The upside to this is that more and more people distrust MSM and realize that MSM seeks to stiffle opinions that are outside the bounds of discourse defined by MSM.