Tommy Robinson, Count Dankula, LOSE Major Income Source
Tommy Robinson and Count Dankula have been demonetized on youtube. Tommy has been directly stripped of all ad revenue while Dankula has been found "not suitable for all advertisers"This means that Tommy loses all of his Youtube income and Dankula loses about 90%.The hard reality is that Youtube is under fire form social justice and feminist activists in media who lie and smear people for political reasons. This puts all youtubers under threat of another adpocalypse and we can all lose a significant portion of our income.Youtube is in a bind but I think they are doing the best, relative to Facebook or Twitter, to protect free speech. Unfortunately the far left and leftist activists do have power in media and will do everything they can to "deplatform" people in an effort to push politics. Although Youtube has done things wrong and Although they may try in some cases to defend speech it may just be a losing battle.
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Tommy Robinson has just been hard demonetized by YouTube and has seen one of his videos placed in a limited state.
This means it can't be shared from within the video page, there's no comments, there's no thumbs up, it's completely restricted, you'll receive a warning message, and YouTube has announced that he will no longer be allowed to make money through advertisements.
Count Dankula has also received a soft demonetization, meaning they manually went into his channel and demonetized every video, but he's still in the partner program and will still theoretically make money, just significantly less money.
There's been something going on within YouTube called a review process, where they're manually going through every single channel, and a ton of people have actually been purged entirely for completely ridiculous reasons.
I actually have a personal story about this, so today, Let's take a look at the latest news of the latest demonetization wave hitting YouTube, and we'll start with the story about Tommy Robinson.
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From BuzzFeed News, YouTube says Tommy Robinson will no longer be able to make money from his videos.
We have suspended ads on Tommy Robinson's YouTube channel as it breaches our advertising policies, a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.
The anti-Islam activist and founder of the English Defense League had been monetizing his videos through YouTube's platform, which allows video makers to collect money from advertisers.
On Thursday, YouTube told BuzzFeed News that it had suspended advertising on Robinson's channel, boasting more than 270,000 subscribers, for violating the company's advertising guidelines.
Earlier this week, Robinson uploaded a photo of a computer screen to Instagram, which appeared to show YouTube taking action against a recent video.
According to the message, YouTube had placed restrictions on how the video will be shown.
This message that Tommy Robinson posted is their limited state message.
So, it says, Your video, Tommy Robinson, Goodbye 2018, Bring on 2019, was flagged to us by the YouTube community.
Upon review, we have placed restrictions on how the video will be shown.
Please note that your video will continue to be available on YouTube.
Basically what happens is that this video will no longer appear on his YouTube channel, the only way to share it is to have the direct URL, and nothing else appears on the page.
There's no comments, there's no likes, there's no share button.
We believe in the principles of free speech, even when the speech is unpopular or potentially offensive to some viewers.
The statement from YouTube Team Red.
However, YouTube doesn't allow hate speech or content that promotes or incites violence.
In the 23-minute recap video of 2018, Robinson rails against prostitutes and left-wing big tech platforms in Silicon Valley, and shows footage that he claims is of him punching a migrant on an Italian street.
Robinson also claimed there was a rape-jihad phenomenon in pretty much every major town and city in our country, and explained why he livestreamed video outside a grooming trial in Leeds, which saw him jailed for contempt of court.
This is where it gets really interesting.
They link to this post from Count Dankula on March 26, 2018, completely unrelated to Tommy Robinson.
And Count Dankula isn't far-right, he's probably more centrist.
I believe his political compass test shows him as a centrist.
But he is a member of UKIP, so maybe conservative is an appropriate title for the time being.
I don't know if far-right makes sense, especially when Dankula's got a communist star tattoo on his chest from his former political beliefs.
But this post he made, it's from last year.
And apparently just following the story, Dankula received another mass demonetization.
Dankula tweeted this morning.
I also could not help but notice that Team YouTube has just demonetized my entire channel.
YouTube have also disabled my ability to use creator support chat to talk to a rep.
Followed up with this about an hour later.
So I wake up this morning all happy that I hit 400k subs.
I then see that I have a DM from a BuzzFeed reporter asking about my monetization.
I found this strange, so I checked, and Team YouTube have demonetized everything on my channel.
Everything.
Videos outlined in red were already demonetized, which I was fine with.
I am fine with my Edgier stuff not being monetized.
All of the other videos, though, were monetized after manual review.
Because everything I upload needs reviewed by default, which I was fine with.
There was no warning or anything for any of this.
No email from YouTube, no explanation as to why or anything.
I've already lost over half of my patrons due to Patreon being censorious, and I now learn that I will no longer be making any income directly from my videos.
I want to point out very quickly that demonetization does not mean you lose all of your money, but it's probably around 90%, so Dankula will still make a very small amount of money, but it is a serious blow to his career.
He says, The ability to actually contact creator support was removed from my channel a while back, so I had to get a direct link from someone.
This is the conversation.
I'm not sure that Neil understood what I was asking, but at least he raised it to another team.
In these images, Dankula is shown having a conversation with someone from YouTube support, who doesn't understand that Dankula's issue is that someone went into his channel and manually demonetized every single video.
YouTube already has something on my channel where no matter what I upload, It needs to be reviewed before it can be monetized.
I even tested this with a private video of Buddha and Bronson playing with a toy.
It needed review.
It was irritating, but I soldiered on.
But even despite the fact that each of my videos were manually reviewed and deemed advertiser-friendly, YouTube, for some reason, have decided to go back on this and demonetized literally everything while providing no warning or reason as to why it did so.
I realize a lot of people say to not do YouTube as a full-time job because they can pretty much fire you at any point for any reason, sometimes no reason.
But thanks to the courts and the media, I don't have a choice.
I literally can't get a regular job.
Do I think anything will be done about this and that it will be fixed?
No, I don't.
I am probably just going to be ignored and only get automated responses or replies of, you broke the rules, with no explanation of specifically what I did wrong, meaning I don't know what to fix.
I think it is safe to assume that this will be permanent and YouTube are not going to fix or provide a reason as to why they did this.
So I'll just continue to make videos until YouTube inevitably terminates my channel.
It is rather interesting timing for Dankula to wake up to a DM from a Buzzfeed reporter and then see that someone went to his channel and manually demonetized everything.
But there's a difference between what Tommy Robinson is experiencing and what Dankula is experiencing.
Robinson has been stripped of his ad support, which means he'll make nothing.
They've removed him outright, and they've actually put one of his videos into a limited state.
Dankula has just been found not suitable for most advertisers.
When you get that yellow dollar sign, you still do make money, just not that much.
So, yeah, it's a pretty big impact on Dankula's income, and it's going to impact him pretty heavily.
Last year, my channel was hit by basically the same thing.
For some reason, there's a bot or something that goes in and just demonetizes everything.
I believe the first person I saw this happen to was Luke Rudkowski of WeAreChange.
They demonetized all of my videos, and I had to go in and manually click review these videos.
Some of them were confirmed.
For Dankula, His videos are all confirmed, which means this had to be action by an individual who went in and started removing his videos directly.
There's been a lot of other things going on in YouTube right now that definitely need to be talked about.
Notably, the banning of Monkey Jones.
Just last month, we saw Monkey Jones have all of his YouTube channels banned, his backup channel banned, he made a new channel, that got banned, and he recently made, well I should say, recently his girlfriend made a channel called Jungle Jimmy where she was uploading his videos, and that was banned too.
The thing is, Mumkey did not break any rules.
However, Mumkey was uploading probably the edgiest content you can think of.
He was really pushing the line on dark humor where he mocked Elliot Rodger in a somewhat ironic way where he facetiously talked about Elliot Rodger's ideas being good.
Now, he didn't break any rules, and YouTube claimed he did.
And this is where it's actually probably the scariest.
Now, Mumkey did get a bit abrasive in his response, and that- look, I'll be honest, if you want to get your channel back, don't go insulting the people who run the platform thinking you're gonna be funny, because they're just gonna tell you to screw off.
But Monkey didn't get a chance.
They didn't say, here's what you did wrong, and that's the same thing that happened to Count Dankula, and theoretically to some of Tommy's content.
But we're going to see a lot more of this.
It was recently published in the New York Times, YouTube bans risky prank videos amidst spate of bird box challenge stunts.
Basically, if there is a prank that can or has caused loss of life, they will not allow you to publish it to YouTube.
And this is another big problem.
Because what are they going to do now?
Are they going to go back to old videos now and start saying, you know what, we're going to retroactively start applying these rules?
Because they have done that in the past.
More importantly, what happens if someone uploads a bunch of videos not realizing they've instituted this rule?
Are they going to give people warnings?
They seem not to.
The appropriate response to Mumkey, in my opinion, is to say, hey, you're pushing a line and we'd prefer it if you didn't do this.
But there's something else going on here that I think is really important, and now I'm gonna do something you probably wouldn't expect.
I'm gonna defend YouTube.
While I do think there are issues, and I do think YouTube has crossed the line in many ways, I actually think YouTube is doing the best to support free expression compared to all the other platforms.
And don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean YouTube gets away scot-free with the things they've done, like banning Monkey, but there's something that needs to be pointed out.
These news organizations, the ones that are infiltrated by far-left activists, they post lies all the time.
They smear PewDiePie.
The Wall Street Journal writes nonsense about PewDiePie.
And that affects all of our income.
Remember the adpocalypse?
That was based off of one article about PewDiePie for the most part, and then all of a sudden everyone lost money because major advertisers didn't want to be associated with YouTube.
Essentially, activists in media are trying to de-platform everyone.
It's really weird how they're acting in defense of the mainstream media and massive corporations like Facebook and otherwise, but the point is, Twitter bans people.
Even when they didn't do anything wrong, they say, you know what, we're gonna ban you.
And that's shocking.
Patreon bans people who didn't break their rules.
That's also shocking.
YouTube didn't ban Tommy, they just put a video in a limited state.
So, you have to realize, YouTube isn't banning many people.
They didn't ban Sargon when he said the n-word, and Patreon did.
YouTube didn't ban Dankula, they just took his monetization away.
And while that sucks for the people you like and the content you watch, you have to realize that YouTube is constantly under attack by activists in media.
And they're actually doing better to defend free speech than many people realize.
Don't get me wrong, I think YouTube has its bias.
I think Google has its bias.
But I also think YouTube is trying to do two things.
Make sure they can maintain revenue to support as many people as possible, and that means sometimes people will get demonetized, and it means sometimes you lose that PR battle, but they aren't outright banning people in the same way that Facebook, Twitter, and Patreon have.
So, I gotta give YouTube some credit for that, but again, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're doing good, I'm just saying they're doing better relative to everybody else, and ultimately it's a losing battle when people get purged from the internet.
The biggest problem with this culture war and how people react is that YouTube censorship bots are crashing creator careers.
People have been told you can make a career on YouTube.
You can work here.
You produce content.
You can make a living.
People dedicate their entire day, with no days off, to make a career on YouTube.
For instance, I don't take days off.
Ever.
Since I started producing daily on this channel, I have never skipped a day.
And in fact, I've increased my workload now with a second channel where I'm producing like between five and six videos per day, which are quicker commentary videos.
And then I actually have a third channel in the works.
I don't take days off and I work my ass off.
And that means there is a serious threat if YouTube bows to pressure from social justice activists in the media.
At the same time, it is a serious struggle.
Some people get knocked out and there's nothing that anyone can really do about it.
If YouTube keeps one person on their platform, and that means everyone loses money, what should YouTube do?
It's tough.
In some regards, I think YouTube should stand up for the smaller creators, and sometimes they do, but they compromise.
Patreon, on the other hand, should have stood up to the payment processors, and didn't.
If Patreon said, you know what?
We're not going to ban people no matter what Mastercard says, you've got Tens of millions of dollars.
You've got tens of thousands or more creators who are going to be impacted, and that's going to be a huge backlash not against Patreon, against the credit card processors.
Someone needs to make a stand.
So I'm not going to say I'm happy that YouTube is doing any of this.
I just want to point out the nuance, and that so long as I'm able to make these videos and bring this information to you, and so long as even people you like aren't getting banned, just restricted, it's not as bad as it could be.
Ultimately, the point I'm trying to make is that it's extremely nuanced and hard to navigate, because I don't think it would be fair for YouTube to sacrifice all of the creator's income over one person.
Is that the right choice?
I honestly don't know.
So let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
What do you think YouTube should do when it comes to these hit pieces?
When, you know, Vox or whoever else, or the Huffington Post, Splinter, when they write a hit piece and advertisers get freaked out, what should YouTube do?
Because if they do nothing, it's possible we face another adpocalypse and then non-related, non-political creators lose money too.
And that could mean content goes down across the board.
Or should they just accept that the hit piece is going to take out one or two YouTubers, and that means the rest of us can keep making content?
Honestly, I just don't know.
So you comment, let me know what you think, we'll keep the conversation going.
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