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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   24387 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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That started way earlier back in 2017 in response to among other things PewDiePie making thirdies do racist jokes on camera via fiver and a bit later calling an opponent a nigger during a stream.

This was not YouTube using these things as a pretext for demonitization. Major advertiser like Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, Adidas, HP, Deutsche Bank, etc. started pulling ads completely from YouTube which lead to a steep fall in ad revenue for the creators. YouTube's response came after, trying to get advertisers back.

It was absolutely advertiser driven. It could well be that advertisers don't care now but they did back then.

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.

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.

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