When YouTube introduced its controversial new “hate speech” and “harassment” rules last year, they quickly caused mass collateral damage on the platform with numerous creators having their content removed, their videos demonetized, and their accounts terminated.
Now more than a year after these new hate speech rules were introduced, YouTube has revealed that these controversial policies are still having a major impact and resulted in more than 100,000 videos and 100 million comments being taken down last quarter.
The takedown of these videos isn’t the only way YouTube’s hate speech and harassment rules have impacted creators.
Under these same rules, YouTube has also demonetized many popular creators including the comedian Steven Crowder, political commentary channel Akkad Daily, and the YouTube commentary channel Tipster.
As a result of being demonetized, these creators can no longer earn ad revenue on their videos, no longer receive one-time donations on live streams via YouTube’s Super Chat feature, and no longer receive monthly donations via YouTube’s channel memberships feature.
Many of the creators who have been demonetized under these rules have also reported that the distribution of their videos on YouTube subequently dipped meaning that not only are they losing access to revenue that they would once have earned but it’s also harder for them to reach new and existing viewers.
And YouTube’s hate speech and harassment rules aren’t the only YouTube policies that have caused a mass purge of videos on the platform.
YouTube also reported that more than 200,000 videos have been scrubbed from the platform under its strict coronavirus misinformation rules.
These rules have resulted in many popular videos featuring doctors and professors being censored for questioning the advice of health authorities’ on the coronavirus or sharing statistics and studies that challenge this advice.
