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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25647 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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They didn't. It was all fake, and an attempt to censor political opposition for the sake of censoring political opposition. There was, and still is, absolutely no evidence they were actually worried about losing profits.

Right. The threat of "advertiser boycotts" was almost certainly dreamed up by people at marketing agencies, and used by their politically-aligned friends at YouTube to get the censorship they wanted. Or possibly they were dreamed up by the YouTube group and the marketing agency people gave the assist.

The people who control the ad spend at large corporates are disproportionately PMC women and metrosexual men with job titles like VP of marketing. (RealMenTM work in sales, not marketing). It would be very odd if these people were happy with their ad spend funding right-populist political content - with no outside pressure needed except the bare minimum to put the issue on the agenda. And it isn't exactly hard to rationalise as a straightforwardly correct commercial decision - in fact for many brands it is a straightforwardly correct commercial decision. People who watch right-populist Youtube videos don't buy packaged laundry detergent - their mothers buy it for them.

in fact for many brands it is a straightforwardly correct commercial decision.

Prove it, please.

People who watch right-populist Youtube videos don't buy packaged laundry detergent - their mothers buy it for them.

Ad targeting algorithms already try to find the most likely buyer, you wouldn't need boycotts if this was what it's about.

It was not all fake. You might claim that the advertiser boycott was intended to censor political opposition but the boycott itself was real.

It's fake in the sense that "it could well be that advertisers don't care now but they did back then" is false. They caree back then exactly as much as they do now, which is not at all. What they were doing was attacking political opposition.

At any rate, advertisers still have a right to choose where they want to put their money. That's why the YouTube "Adpocalypse" was always a fictitious crisis to me by people who wanted to cry "censorship!," because that meant these content creators would have to diversify their platform or find alternative sources of income elsewhere. I'm not a fan of the advertising industry one bit, but calling it censorship stuck me as nothing more than a shout of butthurt among people who think they're entitled to other people's money.

I would agree with you if it was just about the money, people crying over demonetization always came off as rather pathetic to me, but that was a non-issue since Youtube implemented superchats. The real issue was that Youtube used the whole thing to go on a banning, shadow-banning, and algorithimc fuckery spree.

True. But I don't think that should've come as a surprise to anyone. Why should it? You saw that on other fronts as well that had nothing to do with advertising. You saw it with them kicking RussiaToday off the platform at the outset of the Ukraine war (propaganda at work). You saw it with Chess channels having their subscribers removed (collateral damage?). You saw it with both left and right-wing political channels being demonetized (business cycles come and go, progressivism is out of season).

I just don't know why it's captivated the attention of so many people.

Why should it?

Because people couldn't see into the future? I'm pretty sure every single example you brought up followed the Adpocalypse, not preceded it.

Of course people can’t see into the future. I don’t know what tomorrow will hold but I’m very confident about what it’s going to look like.

Corporations all follow such predictable patterns of behavior over time. If the future were that unknowable there wouldn’t have been people saying things like this would come long before the Adpocalypse ever happened.

Then why did all your examples involve incidents that happened after it, and not before it?

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