Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Pedogeddon

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Feb. 23, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

12:31

Pedogeddon

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	So welcome to the second or third adpocalypse or something and this time it's over a paedophile scare that's affecting content creators who are not creating content for paedophiles.
	This is the YouTube channel of the Ballinger family.
	I'd never heard of these but they've got over a million subscribers and they make family-friendly videos.
	They seem to be vlogging their entire family life.
	They seem to be wholesome enough.
	I mean this is their intro video.
	Hi, we're the Ballinger family.
	I'm Jessica.
	I homeschool the kids and I love board games, crafts and a good cup of tea.
	My name's Chris and I've been producing content on YouTube for over 10 years and I created the show Haters Back Off with my sister Colleen.
	But most importantly, I love being a dad and spending time with my family.
	I'm Daley and I'm 10 years old and I love reading and writing.
	I'm Jacob and I'm 8 years old.
	I like building, drumming and baseball.
	Hi, my name is Parker and I am 4 years old and I like to do your astics and I like to buff!
	And together we are the Ballinger family.
	So that seemed really wholesome to me.
	I mean to be honest with you, it came off as excessively American and sickly sweet, but wholesome nonetheless.
	So when this came to my attention, I found it kind of perplexing.
	Jessica Ballinger posted to Twitter, my five-year-old son does gymnastics and is a happy, sweet, confident boy.
	YouTube, not advertiser-friendly.
	This happened yesterday, so on the 20th of February 2019.
	I find the timing on this very, very disheartening from the YouTube community.
	Team YouTube replied with, hi there.
	For reference, over the past few days we've taken a number of actions to better protect the YouTube community from content that endangers minors.
	Here is a tweet from Philip DeFranco for more context.
	And that tweet was this one.
	YouTube creators left a comment and provided an update on what they've done to combat horrible people on the site in the last 48 hours.
	Tilde, disabled comments on tens of millions of videos terminated over 400 channels, reported illegal comments to law enforcement.
	Okay, so why does this affect the Ballingers?
	Well, Team YouTube, let us know.
	With regard to the actions that we've taken, even if your video is suitable for advertisers, inappropriate comments could result in your video receiving limited or no ads.
	Let us know if you have any questions.
	Now it is apparently something someone else can do to get your videos demonetized, which I find really concerning, given the fact that YouTube is going to police this with an algorithm.
	So I decided to take a look at their YouTube videos and see what the comments were like.
	I just chose like random, well-viewed videos.
	I hadn't seen any of the videos, I'm not really interested in watching them, but I just clicked on see what the comments were.
	I just sorted by the newest comments and just went through them and they don't seem to be noticeably pedo comments.
	I guess, I mean, don't get me wrong, there's, I mean, there's doubtless a lot of code words that I'm not familiar with that I don't know to look out for, but I mean, this just seems like normies watching a baby dance and enjoying watching a family vlog their life as some kind of wholesome soap opera.
	But then you get to a video like Parker's Gymnastic Progress number two.
	Now, I haven't even watched this video.
	As you can see, it's paused on 0-0.
	But, I mean, as a father, I'm looking at this and thinking, okay, well, it's a kid doing gymnastics.
	That's not a concern for me.
	But as someone who's familiar with the internet, I can see why the comments are disabled for this video.
	And this one about the same boy recovering from his surgery.
	And a few other videos where it's about that young boy, the four-year-old boy, and doing gymnastics and things like this.
	Totally healthy things for young kids to do, but apparently a magnet for paedophiles, which I mean, I wish there was a more polite way of putting it, but that just seems to be what's happening, as far as I can tell.
	And so YouTube are punishing the Ballinger family themselves for what the worst group of people, people worse than the Nazis, are doing to their channel, which I find rather disheartening.
	I totally appreciate that YouTube is in a hell of a position here because I actually really don't want to assume bad faith on YouTube's part here.
	I genuinely believe that they do not want a pedophile problem on their platform and they are doing everything in their power to do whatever it is they can do to solve it, right?
	The problem is, what can they do?
	Because apparently what these pedos do, and I haven't actually seen it for myself, but I watched Philip DeFranco's video outlining the problem a couple of days ago, and I'll leave a link in the description to it so you can watch it as well.
	They apparently leave timestamps in the comments with some comment of correct angle or something like that.
	And it's just like, okay, that's that's disgusting.
	You know, that's that's really gross.
	I don't know what they can do.
	I mean, like, the video itself isn't against the terms of service.
	The comment, I guess technically isn't.
	It's innuendo, but it obviously has to be dealt with.
	You obviously can't just allow nests of pedos to operate on YouTube.
	What on earth can YouTube do?
	And I can see that YouTube have a real problem because this is creating a big media problem, a PR scare for YouTube.
	Advertisers are pulling out as well.
	So at this point, what on earth is YouTube supposed to do?
	But they know they are supposed to do something, and that's what all of us are expecting.
	Yeah, you've got to do something about this.
	And honestly, like I said, as a father, I am totally with you doing something about this.
	The question is what?
	And I tell you what, as a professional content creator, it is scary watching other channels being targeted for this kind of stuff.
	Not that my channels would ever be targeted for pedos or anything, but like, if mass commenting, a certain kind of thing, is something that can get a video demonetized, I don't think it's a very difficult thing for a malicious actor to set up a bot that would generate all of these comments for you on almost every one of someone's videos, an entire channel.
	And you could demonetize an entire channel, if not take one down, which has happened to other channels for other reasons a lot recently.
	Because of YouTube's sweeping algorithm changes, because there's so much focus and pressure on them right now.
	I'm not even necessarily worried about them deplatforming me for political reasons at this point.
	I'm kind of worried that they'll do it accidentally and then decide, well, it's gone now.
	And so I'm sure that Team YouTube can appreciate that even people who might disagree with them politically are still people with responsibilities and families and investments in their platform.
	But who knows what'll happen?
	That's the point.
	I have absolutely no idea.
	And I really thought it was worth bringing this to everyone's attention.
	Not that I'm sure many of you didn't know this, but to the people who didn't, I thought it might be worth talking about this specifically from my position.
	And I thought it might be worth letting you know that I actually have a channel on a website called BitChute, which is like a torrent video site rather than a direct hosting video site.
	So it operates like BitTorrent, basically, and it's a decentralized platform, which honestly, I think that eventually they'll all have to go something like that because of just the storage capacity required, I think is going to be surely beyond the pale.
	But this one presumably can scale infinitely with just the number of users using it.
	I think it's a really great idea.
	And I'm not surprised to see that Silicon Valley is targeting it for censorship.
	Because BitChute is also a vocally pro-free speech platform, they have been banned from PayPal because they're not banning people who promote ideologies that PayPal find reprehensible.
	They're in fact very much a video version of Gab, which again is an openly free speech platform that was banned by PayPal because they wouldn't punish or target people from certain ideologies that they wanted to see banned.
	Nothing illegal, but things that had otherwise been considered haram.
	But I think the most important reason that I could suggest for you to subscribe to my BitChute channel is because Styx Hexenhammer is kicking the shit out of me in subscribers on there.
	I only have 22,648 subscribers.
	Styx Hexenhammer has 35,051.
	And as you can see in the thumbnails of his videos, he's got a lovely shiny plate on his wall behind him.
	He doesn't deserve that.
	We need to take this from him.
	We have to crush Styx Hexenhammer.
	Obviously not.
	But no, it would be fun if I could be him, just for the fun of it.
	I mean, he won't care.
	Obviously, I'm just joking, but I genuinely am getting quite worried.
	So if you would like to make sure you're able to follow my work in the event of the worst happening, then I'll leave a link in the description to my BitChute channel.
	And as far as I'm aware, all of the alternative media content creators, at least I follow, all have accounts there as well.
	So it's not just me you can go over there for.
	But I tell you what, man, I really at some points feel like I'm living on the edge of the internet and it's genuinely quite scary sometimes.
	So I guess I'll take this moment to thank everyone who supports me on Subscribestar because my God, my life would be way scarier if it wasn't for you.
	Because I mean, I'm genuinely concerned that I'm just going to be mass demonetized at any point.
	Like what happened to Count Ancula.
	And I mean, the reason that it wasn't so bad that Patreon decided to kick me off one day for reasons that I don't find adequate is that I had the income from YouTube because I make videos, obviously.
	And so it wasn't going to bankrupt me.
	However, if YouTube are going to start mass demonetizing channels, well, that's another story, isn't it?
	And finally, I can announce the winner of my t-shirt competition.
	I'm really sorry it took two years.
	I'm genuinely so sorry it took this long.
	But I'd like to congratulate Mintautis, if I'm pronouncing your name correctly.
	I've sent you an email to the email address that you entered to the competition asking you if this is also your PayPal address so I can pay you the $2,500 I believe it was that you've won.
	Thank you very much.
	And I liked your piece of art so much I decided to change my channel out to it.
	That was the one that won.
	It was really good.
	Thank you.
	And for anyone who's wondering, I'll probably put the winners of the previous iterations of the competition up at some point for sale again.
	So I had a lot of requests at the time after they, so I was only putting them up for like a week.
	And then afterwards, people, oh no, I didn't get my paycheck in time or something like that.
	So I'll, in a, you know, in like next month or something, I'll put them up again.
	So people, if you want to get them, the option is there.
	And again, thanks to everyone for all the support.
	And I hope that the work I'm doing makes the support worthwhile.
	A lot of what I do is actually studying and I think I've been doing quite well at the moment in what I've been learning.
	But I hope the videos have been good and I've been really, I've been working hard on them.
	And the team are really helping me out.
	Honestly, they're such lifesavers.
	It's just so helpful to have other people around to be able to just not just do things for you, but to give you advice and give you input, you know.
	And YouTube, come on, have a heart, man.
	You know, it's a genuinely scary time to be a content creator on YouTube.
	And it's weird because I've never felt like this before.
	You know, I've never felt that YouTube was a scary place to be because of all of the platforms on social media and Silicon Valley platforms, YouTube was by far the most reliable.
	Even if they were most difficult to contact, they were at least the most reliably on the side of the content creators.
	But for the last couple of years, that has really been changing.
	And it's been because of pressure from the media and various activists.
	And you've got to give us a you've got to you've got to start really kind of helping people out, YouTube.
	It's genuinely quite terrifying.
	Seriously, though, do follow all of your favorite creators outside of Silicon Valley platforms.
	I'm not trying to just say Silicon Valley is an evil place.
	I don't think it is.
	I just think the people there are in a very unenviable position and they have sets of beliefs that they have trouble squaring with, frankly, the rest of the world.
	And they I'm sure are doing their best, but they're also putting a lot of people in very precarious positions.

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