Shadow banning, how it actually works on youtube the politics of soft censorship

there are a lot of sources of gossip
innuendo and misinformation here on the internet one of the most powerful and one of the most often overlooked is fear some people make up stories they make up explanations for things because they're afraid in ancient times people wanted to know what caused thunder what caused lightning what caused tornadoes and they made up explanations that really if you just think about it carefully don't make sense fundamentally cannot make sense they're neither true nor false but nonsensical and something similar goes on here on youtube in the 21st century with people who want to believe they understand the reasons for and the mechanisms behind censorship here on youtube and we are specifically and especially talking about soft censorship right not the outright banning of videos not the right deletion of videos not the right deletion of your whole channel because at least you get an email explaining to you what happened and why when that happened but the curious position you're in as a youtube content creator when one video is more successful than another when one video mysteriously never seems to reach its potential audience and again the most sympathetic thing i can say to the people who are making up these frankly irrational explanations for how youtube works the most sympathetic thing i can say is i understand their delusions are fueled by fear if you rely on youtube as your source of income you're afraid you can't pay your rent you're afraid you're going to make less money than you're expecting next month maybe for a couple of months you made an okay income and now all of a sudden you're not making enough income fear if you're not even on that level maybe you're not making a dime out of youtube or someone like me who makes just a hundred dollars a month it's a symbolic amount of money on youtube nevertheless you may be afraid about your own wasted efforts you put a lot of time and effort into a certain video research editing performance what have you and you feel like that video mysteriously didn't reach the audience it could have reached or should have reached because of soft censorship because of what you imagine shadow banning to be now when people talk about this for the most part they're not youtubers most parts members of the audience who talk to me about this and i often challenge them to define precisely what it is they mean by terms like shadow banning and most time they can't do it they can't actually answer the question tell you precisely what shadow banning means now they know what it means when your video gets deleted or when your channel gets deleted you know that the extreme end of youtube censorship but the moderate end they have trouble quantifying and we can quantify it i'm going to tell you right now what shadow banning really means i'm going to compare two videos that were uploaded at about the same time on my channel and they managed to reach the same number of viewers the same number of thumbs up the difference is the number of impressions they received i'm going to tell you what that means in just a second so here's a video on my channel that got to 2300 viewers and you will notice that it is a very politically provocative title it's exactly the sort of thing youtube likes to censor that youtube likes to restrict the the viewership for okay but nevertheless and we'll talk about that too it reached 2306 views it has 130 thumbs up there's no evidence the thumbs up matter for this equation but i'm just mentioning in terms of the audience's level of interest what have you but the number of impressions this video with its politically provocative title received was only 12 811. okay what are impressions this is the measure of how many times youtube advertised your video within its own ecosystem how much advertising and promotion youtube is affording your video here on youtube within youtube now some of you might say okay how can you complain 12 000 that's a really high number i'm going to compare this to a video that didn't have a politically provocative title and you'll see the difference so that's one thing keep in mind i have 11 000 subscribers so when i get this number even if that seems positive hey 12 000 impressions all of those impressions all 12 000 could be youtube advertising my video to people who already are my subscribers or there's another category people who haven't subscribed but people have already clicked on two three or four of my videos people who are regular viewers or repeat viewers even if they're not subscribers now if you're a regular user of youtube even if you don't upload you have probably experienced this there's a certain channel and you clicked on three or four of their videos at some point and then as you navigate the rest of the youtube ecosystem as you're in other places on youtube youtube is recommending to you it's advertising to you new videos so that's exactly what we're discussing here all right so i mean this ain't rocket science all right now here is a youtube video i made with a totally non-politically provocative title talking about jenna marbles talking about i mean the video actually is somewhat politically provocative if you watch the whole thing it's a little bit edgy a little bit insightful a little bit disturbing this reached 2375 viewers if you count almost identical but how many impressions did this video receive this video received 32 726 impressions 32 000. so the number of times this video was advertised within the youtube ecosystem vastly greater even though it reached exactly the same number of viewers we have approximately the same number of thumbs up all the other factors are the same and the difference is one video is uh politically offensive i don't know how to put it politically challenging it's the kind of content youtube is discouraging it's the kind of content youtube is if you want to use the term shadow banning right and the other is this sort of safe nambi pamby commentary content that youtube implicitly or explicitly encourages us to upload right that is the sole difference and that is the measurable quantitative reality of so-called shadow banning now there's a counter argument here the videos did in effect reach the same number of viewers why and how because the video with the provocative title people cared about it people shared the link the good thing about youtube censorship is that we can overcome it you can have your own website outside of youtube you can have your own blog your fans can share the link to your video on facebook through reddit just through email they can send the link to friends of theirs who would be interested fans sharing the link outside of youtube is really the lifeblood of youtube in 2020 that is what you absolutely critically rely on for your success and the analytics system most of the time not always if you're a creator it shows you these sources of success so to give an example i've done several videos recently talking about the disadvantages of playing video games why as an adult you should quit playing video games or why you shouldn't be a video game addict this type of theme one of those videos was much more successful than the others it reached a larger audience why not because of impressions not because of shadow banning not for this issue at all when you click through the analytics you could see someone had shared the link to a reddit group and a thousand people or something that read a group were interested and talked about it and clicked on the video and carried on a discussion sharing the link with people who aren't interested doesn't help sharing it to a random reddit group doesn't help but somebody i don't know who it wasn't me shared this link with a group of people who were interested they discussed it that overcomes whatever so-called system of shadow banning or censorship is involved here if people want to see the video if people want to share the link to the video it still will reach an audience now again i have some sympathy for the people who have this fear-based mentality who are spinning out you know one new myth after another about how youtube censorship works uh and you know how shadow banning how these other phenomena may be restricting their their their own career but i'd really warn you as strongly as i possibly can this is very similar to a religious mentality for centuries educated people in modern western europe would interpret what happened with the weather as the will of god it's mind-blowing if you just read historical non-fiction if you read quotations from these people people who when there was hail they read that as an act of god when there was a good harvest that was an act of god when there was a bad harvest there was nothing about any phenomena good or bad could be interpreted as the will of god and then it's especially disturbing when you get into war and politics well you know the the british defeated the spanish in this particular battle so clearly that shows they say that god was on their side that god favors british protestantism over spanish catholicism really zero irony historically people believe this people talk about this this self-justifying way of interpreting the facts of history but then of course if the opposite happens when the spanish win a battle or the spanish win a whole war they say well god is rebuking us because you know we were on an ego trip we needed to be humbled and they'll find quotations in the bible but that kind of thing any possible empirical experience can be reinterpreted in light of the mythology once you've already committed to believing in the mythology and the same thing happens here on youtube whether you're talking about gabby hannah whether you're talking about small youtubers like me you can interpret your success as being granted to you by this magical algorithm and you can interpret your failure as being granted you by this magical algorithm and the truth is the algorithm doesn't exist the truth is that when you engage in prayer you're just talking to yourself i am a content creator i have some sympathy for my fellow content creators and their complaints in the setting but let's keep it all the way real youtube is just a website within the last couple of days we had a very powerful example of advertiser activism when suddenly out of the blue the washington redskins agreed to change the name of the team it's an overtly racist and offensive name for a sports team for at least 50 years people have been saying they should change the team name probably it's more than 50 years that enlightened minds have been urging them to change the name the man who is still the ceo the lead executive for the sports team he has said on the record many many times in recent years that he supports the tradition he wants to keep the name the same do you know why he changed his mind because a group of advertisers got together and told him jointly if you don't change the name of the team we're canceling all our advertisements we're canceling all our promotions we're canceling all sponsorship deals we're going to walk out if you don't change the name of this team youtube faces this same kind of pressure youtube has had to face the concerted efforts of advertisers of advertiser activism who said to youtube either you play by our rules either you clean up your content or we are going to leave now there's more than one thing you can do in those negotiations i'm not saying youtube made the right decision not at all i think youtube has made terrible strategic decisions but the solution here ultimately is to have competitors to youtube who are going to play the game by different rules i think there should be some websites that are more censored than youtube where they guarantee you that every video on the website is appropriate for children 8 to 11 years old like it's super super censored so that kids can watch and i think there should be another competitor to youtube that allows nudity and frank discussion of sexuality and another competitor to youtube that's allows uh political discourse more freely including footage of war zones what have you you know i think we need more than one solution to this problem freedom of speech is not some simple problem that's going to have one policy or one answer there are going to be many different ways to pose the question in many different ways to come to productive answers as much as i may have sympathy for my fellow content creators i also can kind of have sympathy for the devil here i also can have sympathy for youtube and realize that if i had been put in their position i would be struggling to come to some kind of similar compromise how do you feel about people propounding flat earth theory on youtube youtube has admitted basically in various kinds of interviews and statements that magazines would have that that is an example of something they discourage in this sense in the sense i just showed you this is shadow band that now propounding crazy conspiracy theories that are actually harmful and scientifically untrue like flat earth theory that this is in this sense shadow band it's not encouraged it's not promoted on youtube anymore because they felt this was getting out of control how do you feel about youtube channels that encourage people to eat a 100 meat diet youtube channels that say to you dead serious that you can be healthy and beautiful and strong you can lose weight and feel great eating nothing but ribeye steak water and vodka yes i'm thinking of a particular extremely popular youtube channel that sells and promotes this diet that diet that diet will literally kill you are you going to allow that are you going to allow a youtube channel that tells people they can drink poison where where do you draw the line at what point is health advice so dangerous and so unscientific that you if you were the ceo of youtube that you would be willing to shadowband it i am not saying that youtube drew the line in the correct or appropriate place i'm just saying it's inevitable that somebody has to draw the line if you want to beat youtube if you want to support content creators like me there's a really simple way to win share the links to our videos outside of youtube whether that be in facebook groups reddit groups or by email if you want more people to see the content you care about if you want to support the future of this channel that's all you got to do copy and paste the url share the link outside of youtube