Remember last month when I complained about YouTube shadowbanning Jeremy Crow’s videos, and in that post I pointed out how YouTube’s quest for censorship is nonsensical and serves no purpose other than to make YouTube look good to potential advertisers? Weeeeeelll, it appears YouTube has hit a major snag in that department.
For all the fuss that was generated over “extremist” video content, which mostly was just a way of saying they’re going to try to suppress politically incorrect content, YouTube didn’t count on what really fucked their brand this weekend: pedophiles. Or, more specifically, the presence of videos depicting real children appearing in suggestive situations for pedophiles to masturbate to, or the presence of pedophiles chortling to the comments sections of home videos featuring children in which they express their desire to have sex with them. According to an investigation from The Times this is being financially supported by ads from major corporations, including Amazon, eBay, BT and TalkTalk, appearing on those videos. This has resulted in overwhelming backlash from advertisers, who have been pulling their YouTube ads and expressing doubt over YouTube’s commercial viability.
So let’s just get this straight: YouTube, in a desperate bid to sanitize their platform by chasing the alt-right bogeymen away, left out the large numbers of pedophiles who are on their website, and searching for videos of scantily clad children so that they can leer at those children, and now that this has come to light it is hurting their brand, when they thought all they had to worry about was some Nazis ranting about Jews and the Holocaust. Good job YouTube. You’ve demonstrated once again how much of a farce your censorious policies are proving to be.
I’m sure YouTube are going to clean this up in the light of such a major boycott from advertisers – this is their bottom line we’re talking about – but, if you defended YouTube for removing content it doesn’t deem advertiser friendly before, are you now beginning to see a problem with this position? Apparently it’s not OK to shitpost or express opinions that the company deems offensive or disposable, but it is OK for pedophiles to lurk on your website for lord knows how long and leer at people’s prepubescent daughters. It is increasingly impossible defend YouTube, and by proxy its parent company Google, over its plans to regulate the content and information that appears on its platform when such scandals, and more, spread like wildfire so easily, and can be shown without much difficulty for the farce that they are. I sincerely hope that more people come to realize this as time goes by.
Aleph's Heretical Domain 