YouTuber Ethan Klein has condemned YouTube’s decision to demonetize his video on grounds of “racism”.
Asking YouTube to fire whoever made the call to label his video racist, Ethan highlighted the fact that there wasn’t any timestamp to even back the claims of racism that was implied by YouTube’s human moderator.
“@TeamYouTube hi can we agree to fire whoever marked our newest video as being racist?”
“This is regarding our newest h3h3productions video – They said it is racist and stopped showing it to people. Didnt even provide a timestamp,” tweeted Ethan.
While bot moderators are not as competent as humans in weeding out sensitive issues and imposing bans or demonetizations, it is surprising that even a human moderator ended up demonetizing a video without presenting any timestamp where so-called “racism” was found.
Bot moderators are known for flagging and demonetizing videos that need not be; and fairly, several YouTubers have been outspoken about the issue and highlighted YouTube’s delay in conducting a follow-up review by a human moderator.
The video that was labeled racist by YouTube’s human moderator(s), “Everybody Loves Ethan”, was actually a response to a critical video uploaded by a YouTube creator “SomeOrdinaryGamers”.
Ethan mentioned his frustration with the fact that his video was not only tagged racist, but was done so without any basic evidence such as a timestamp.
YouTube, after the tweet started gaining traction, acknowledged Ethan’s request and asked him to provide a URL. Maybe another round of review may help reverse the demonetization on Ethan’s video.
At times such as this, where a better part of the world is handicapped by the pandemic and lockdowns, creators unfortunately rely on YouTube to help them make money online to support themselves.
YouTube is naturally censorship-heavy, causing great frustration to countless creators on the web as their livelihoods are increasingly at risk.
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