Young Turks host Hasan Piker even declared that “America deserved 9/11” in response to Congressman Dan Crenshaw doing an interview with Joe Rogan where he said that Osama Bin Laden attacked the U.S. because of our western values.831 Piker also appeared to praise Al Qaeda for blinding Crenshaw (a retired Navy SEAL) who lost an eye while serving in Afghanistan in 2012.832 He then mocked the disabled veteran for having one eye. Hasan Piker is allowed to host a show on the platform, but Alex Jones isn’t. Piker has his own personal YouTube channel as well, that hasn’t been demonetized.
In 2016 YouTube launched their “Creators for Change” program where they began funding and coaching various YouTubers to make videos denouncing “hate speech,” “xenophobia,” and “extremism.”833 These handpicked social justice warriors produce propaganda for the platform and some of them promote the latest degeneracy the Left is trying to convince people is normal.
At the end of every year YouTube produces a mashup of what they consider to be the year’s top stars and it’s always a bunch of SJWs and LGBT activists. Their 2018 “Rewind” video, as it’s called, featured drag queens and highlighted Hollywood celebrities like Will Smith and John Oliver over ordinary YouTubers. It got so many thumbs down that overnight it became the most disliked video on YouTube ever.834 Shortly after that, YouTube announced that they were trying to figure out how to prevent what they called “dislike mobs” from “weaponizing the dislike button” and considered removing it altogether.835
The Adpocalypse
Since I’m an old school YouTuber, I was posting videos for six years before my channel was monetized (at the end of 2012) opening the door for me to become a professional YouTuber. While it has always been difficult to make a living on YouTube because monetized videos only pay a small fraction of a penny per view, a few years after I started doing it full time, it became almost impossible, especially for smaller channels that aren’t getting five to ten million views a month.
In April 2017 after the Wall Street Journal published a report about finding advertisements for major brands appearing on “racist” and “offensive” videos, all hell broke loose. Tons of companies pulled their advertisements from the platform entirely, kicking off what us YouTubers call the “Adpocalypse” (advertising apocalypse). YouTube immediately rolled out some new tools they had been testing to comb through the titles, tags, and descriptions of videos and automatically demonetize (strip advertisements from) ones that were about (or even mentioned) certain topics.
Every video uploaded is now immediately scanned by YouTube’s voice recognition software which creates a transcript of everything that’s said in the video. That transcript is then scanned for keywords that may indicate a video is about a “sensitive” or “controversial” topic and then demonetizes it if certain words or phrases are found. As a result of the Adpocalypse, almost half of all of my videos were demonetized, and from that point on making a living on YouTube became uncertain.
News channels like mine were hit the hardest, because news and politics are filled with “divisiveness” and controversial issues that YouTube wanted to shield advertisers from. For people who make cooking videos, or how-to videos about fixing cars, or doing home improvement projects, those kinds of videos aren’t about anything that’s particularly “non-advertiser friendly” like ones that talk about illegal immigration, climate change, political cover-ups, or exposing fake news.
Bloomberg News later reported, “In fact, 96.5% of all of those trying to become YouTubers won’t make enough money off of advertising to crack the U.S. poverty line.”836 Their report continued bearing bad news, pointing out that, “Breaking into the top 3% of most-viewed channels could bring in advertising revenue of about $16,800 a year… That’s a bit more than the U.S. federal poverty line of $12,140 for a single person. (The guideline for a two-person household is $16,460.) The top 3% of video creators of all time in [the research group’s] sample attracted more than 1.4 million views per month.”837
But even for those who never expected to be full-time YouTubers, it was still nice to make a few dollars every month for the time and effort put into creating videos about things they’re passionate about. Despite the loss of income caused by the increased scrutiny, a lot of the more popular YouTuber news channels were still able to get by, or at least kept making videos because it’s about the message not the money, but we all have to pay the bills, so YouTube decided to make people’s lives even harder by demonetizing entire channels instead of just certain videos.
In January 2019 Tommy Robinson’s entire channel was demonetized.838 A few months later in May 2019 Count Dankula was fully demonetized. What’s particularly interesting is that he learned about it from an email from BuzzFeed asking for a statement about it. It appears they had lobbied YouTube to get him demonetized and then reached out to him for a comment immediately after their YouTube source confirmed they had done it.839
BuzzFeed learned about it before him, which speaks volumes about what’s happening. Sargon of Akkad’s channel was also completely demonetized because of a rape joke he had made three years earlier on Twitter, and—what a “coincidence”—BuzzFeed was the first to break that story as well.840
Another round of mass demonetization and channel bans occurred in June 2019 (dubbed the Vox Adpocalypse) occurred after a gay activist named Carlos Maza, who works at Vox, ranted nonstop on Twitter for an entire week about conservative comedian Steven Crowder making fun of him. Maza’s rant, which was conveniently timed to coincide with the kickoff of gay pride month for extra leverage, was a rallying call for liberals to pressure YouTube to completely ban Crowder (the most-subscribed conservative channel on YouTube) for “hate speech” because he called Maza a “lispy queer” since he talks with a lisp, and he’s a queer.
What do you think the “Q” stands for in LGBTQ? They call themselves queers, but normal people can’t use the word now apparently because the Left is trying to claim that only gay people can say queer, similarly to the double standard most black people have about the n-word.
While YouTube didn’t ban Steven Crowder from YouTube, or give him any community guideline strikes to take down any of his videos; they did demonetize his entire channel, not just the “offensive” videos in question, which were probably never even monetized to begin with, thus, preventing him from ever making another dollar from the pre-roll ads you often see before videos start playing.841
It wasn’t just Steven Crowder’s channel though. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of others were hit at the same time, some of which were very popular with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.842 YouTube said this was just the beginning of their latest crackdown, and vowed to purge more “hateful” right-wing channels.
The very next week the New York Times ran a front page story titled “The Making of a YouTube Radical” which included a collage of various (mostly) conservative YouTubers who have sizable followings, and told the story about how a lonely loser named Caleb Cain “fell down the YouTube rabbit hole” and it turned him into a “radical.” How radical? The Times explained that, “He began referring to himself as a ‘tradcon’ — a traditional conservative,” supported “old-fashioned gender norms,” started dating a Christian girl, and “fought with his liberal friends.”843