What’s up with YouTube?

Youtube is a video streaming website that millions of people around the world can access. YouTube was created on February 17th, 2005, it was created with a bunch of rules and regulations. With these regulations came a set of “Ghost rules” which were extremely vague rules that have been looked over ever since 2005, in 2016, eleven years later, YouTube started enforcing these “Ghost rules” and the community was outraged. YouTube started demonetizing videos that break these rules, examples of demonetized videos are, some videos on “Politically incorrectness” and videos that use vulgar or demeaning language. those videos cannot have those 30 second ads. This is VERY bad for big YouTubers. These YouTubers make money when people click on those ads, those companies that also get money from those ads don’t want to be represented by someone who uses inappropriate behavior. In a community outcry, hundreds of YouTubers made rant videos explaining how these rules aren’t fair. One example of this is when Philip DeFranco made a video mocking “political correctness.” DeFranco was then demonetized and in response, he made a rant video.

DeFranco later said “I will not censor myself.”

These policies can affect viewers in many ways. They can remove “viral” videos that millions enjoyed just because the creator forgot to censor a word. People are outraged at the fact that these policies have been here forever, hiding in the cracks, and are just now being used against the community. YouTubers are starting to lose income from their full time job. Although YouTube is a privately owned company owned by Google, it is also a corporation, with millions of people making videos for their company. In other words, YouTube is “playing themselves.” They are cutting off their main source of income, advertisements. Youtubers will stop using ads in revolt, this might effect YouTube.

We should care about these changes. We all have seen that one viral video that made us cry of laughter, or that video full of ridiculous mistakes. These videos might not exist later this year because of these policies. YouTube is becoming “ad-friendly,” which is good and bad. YouTube might gain more ad companies, but YouTubers might not want those ads. It could be bad because YouTube could lose their main source of income. If you were a YouTuber with millions of subscribers, would you want your videos to be taken down because of a politically incorrect opinion?