YouTube Secretly HIDING Videos?

I feel sorry for all of youtubers who are affected by this, however I can't imagine how on earth youtube can fix this issue any other way.

After Patreon's little fiasco with Lauren Southern and how they tried to justify cutting her out by saying her funding was going towards illegal activities that would prove dangerous to human life (complete BS) I don't trust Youtube to properly "curate" what videos are deemed appropriate. This seems very much like an excuse that they will be employing in future to "accidentally" censor people who they have had complaints about, even if there is no hate-speech or inciting of violence.

How does the AI it know to pick between reporting on violent extremism and the extremism itself? Any channel that does news about these important issues is going to go straight into the can (except maybe if there are people who are on the "right" side of the issue). Are they using the regular definition of "violent" or the overly-sensitive definition, which includes anything that COULD be taken offensively?

It's an excuse to go, "whoops, how did that happen. Oh well, your channel had enough of these that it's been deleted. What, you didn't get notified you had ANY strikes at all? They'd be attached to your channel, and we can't recover data to check, so it's too late and too bad. Have a nice life."

Sure, I'm a bit paranoid, but with Patreon (and Facebook's) issues with censorship, I don't trust Youtube not to follow suit.

The demonitization thing made sense to me, in theory. Hiding videos like this does not. Sure, it's their platform and they can do what they want, and sure, they're "only" hiding "bad" videos, but I really don't care for how they've taken it upon themselves to decide what's "bad" and making it so that that category of video can't even be found via searching for anyone to determin that for themselves. What's "bad" now is probably pretty bad, but I'm concerned for the future as the idea of what's "acceptable" and "safe" becomes a more and more narrow window.

Demonitize things that adds don't want to be associated with, sure, but let the viewers decide what's okay to see for themselves. If people don't want to view those videos, they won't. If they're concerned about kids, have them use restricted accounts.

I work in online marketing, I can tell you the other side of this story... allegedly. (consider all the following just an opinion, not facts)

The reason why old school youtubers were hit the hardest at the start of the adpocalypse was, simply put, because their content sucks (at making ad revenue). The adwords system doesn't distribute advertisement opportunities evenly, it prefers videos and channels which would maximize the revenue. 

The algorithm used is a google trade secret, but it's assumed that the ad view rate (ads viewed/ads shown) is an important signal in it, and traditional youtubers have performed very low in that regard lately. When several brands pulled out of youtube, the ads simply redistributed in favor of "better" content.

Now, who are the top earners nowadays? (based on my experience with the platform) Around the top there are: music videos, content for kids, and content from traditional media. After that comes "viral" videos, clickbait, some other garbage, and then youtubers.

If you're wondering why there are so many channels with people wearing spiderman and elsa costumes, playing with fidget spinners and doing the floor is lava or some other stupid challenge... that's because parents are using youtube as an electronic pacifier, and these videos are getting a lot of ad revenue.

Brands eventually came back to youtube, but this time they were very zealous about the configuration of these ad campaigns. Before the adpocalypse, marketing agencies did very little configuring on youtube ad campaigns, now they have the brands asking for more policing, which in turn became kind of an internal discussion of how to best prevent something like this happening again, they asked each other and google for advise, and the result of all this is that there is a blacklist of topics where ads should be blocked.

Let me explain that further. There's a set of topics which google uses to classify the content on their network. You can set an ad to appear only on certain topics, or make it so that they don't appear on a topic. These topics are broad and not 100% accurate, and it's also assigned to content using AI (probably based on audience matching). So to avoid another incident, your best bet is to block certain topics deemed "problematic"... and guess who's there? You probably guessed it... the topics which youtubers like to do content about.

There's also all topics related to sexuality, not only lgbt... if you had a channel about heterosexual sex education, you probably were hit too.

Makers of conservative content (Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro and Ann Coulter to name just a few) have faced a similar problem for some time now.  YouTube (and Facebook for that matter) too often deem conservative ideas to be too controversial and send them off to that "bad boy" corner.