YouTube has continued to demonetize videos from popular content creators, now effecting interviewer Dave Rubin and fast food reviewer TheReportOfTheWeek.
Rubin announced the demonetization in a series of posts on Twitter, where he claimed nearly his “entire catalogue” of videos had been affected, including interviews with former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, professor Jordan B. Peterson, former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, feminist activist and scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, television host Larry King, and conservative commentator Steven Crowder.
Rubin also claimed to have had several “pointless exchanges” with YouTube representatives, who declined to discuss the issue of demonetization and censorship in one of his videos.
Several other popular YouTube creators have also been demonetized recently, including fast food reviewer TheReportOfTheWeek, who had both a Burger King review and a video update on Hurricane Irma demonetized by the platform.
During an interview between Dave Rubin and fellow YouTube creator Philip DeFranco, who has also been effected by YouTube demonetization, the two discussed the current problems with censorship on the platform.
“There is a lot of people very frustrated with YouTube, just from creators to people watching, people are feeling this whole demonetization thing, which you’ve done a bunch of videos on, there’s a feeling that there’s some censorship being involved, happening right now,” declared Rubin. “We now have videos for this month that’s just gone, we have videos in our backend that were not tagged, not titled, they had no metadata attached to them, and they were demonetized.”
“Yeah that’s something we noticed specifically on our vlog channel. Not on the Philip DeFranco show, which is very strange,” replied DeFranco. “We had a video where I was just standing around talking. Autoflagged. We changed the information multiple times. I mean this is not a unique story. It’s so weird and confusing, and I don’t get it.”
Last month, YouTube demonetized several videos from former presidential candidate Ron Paul, following their announcement that they’d “police YouTube like it never has before,” according to a report.
Over the past year, several large and prominent YouTube creators have revealed they no longer make money on videos, following a wave of demonetization crackdowns by the company.
As previously reported, “The list includes popular conservative commentators such as Diamond and Silk and Prager U, but also includes some of the platform’s biggest creators, ranging from comedy and politics to sex education and gaming.”
A popular technique by YouTube is to “age-restrict” videos which aren’t “suitable” for advertisers, resulting in the creator’s inability to make money from advertisements.
Earlier this month, YouTube also declared that if “enough users flag a video as ‘hate speech’ or ‘violent extremism,’ YouTube may impose restrictions on the content even if it breaks none of the platform’s rules,” according to a report.
The company also announced a partnership with the left-wing biased Anti-Defamation League, which previously blamed Trump supporters for the rise of anti-Semitism, added a popular cartoon frog meme to their Hate Symbol Database, and attempted to slander Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington and Gab @Nash, or like his page at Facebook.