It sure seems like it, and a recent deal between Google and Disney might be behind it.
The Star Wars fan channel “Star Wars Theory,” a channel with over three million subscribers, announced on Monday that his recent video concerning the new Disney+ Star Wars show “The Acolyte” had been demonetized. The video displayed the criticism of the Star Wars community against “The Acolyte” noting that the Star Wars fan community has united in a big way against it.
“The censorship has begun” posted Niatoos Dadbeh, the channel’s host and owner, along with a screenshot of YouTube’s letter to him indicating that his video had been demonetized and delisted from appearing from being suggested to YouTube users.
The censorship has begun pic.twitter.com/mD7sd7jfp5
— StarWarsTheory (@realswtheory) June 18, 2024
Interestingly, Jeremy Hambly of “The Quartering” noticed his video about “The Acolyte” had been demonetized as well.
So @TeamYouTube there is CLEARLY something going on here. 3/4 of my videos are getting flagged but I mean since when did Star Wars get controversial? pic.twitter.com/0T9rEyQWnF
— TheQuartering (@TheQuartering) June 18, 2024
Watching Dadbeh’s video, in particular, there isn’t anything in it that breaks YouTube’s terms of service. What YouTube did tell Dadbeh, however, is that the video “isn’t suitable for all advertisers” due to a tiny curse word in his thumbnail that came from an X post. Dadbeh commented that you had to take a magnifying glass out to see it, then pointed out that there is plenty of content out there that contains curse words in the title themselves that still seems to be easily findable.
In other words, the person doing the manual review had to look very, very hard for something that could have violated TOS and decided to use the tiniest curse word in the thumbnail while other content that contains the same word gets a pass.
It feels very targeted and as if YouTube is trying to find any excuse they can to hide content critical of “The Acolyte.”
(READ: Star Wars Is Now Lesbian Space Witches…I’m Not Kidding)
While there is no concrete evidence that this is what YouTube is trying to do, there is one thing that might explain YouTube’s actions.
According to Search Engine Land, Disney and Goole announced a partnership back in March to expand its ad platform. Google would help make it easier for businesses to get their ads displayed on Disney’s streaming platforms, meaning Disney+ and Hulu. While YouTube is owned by Google and not Disney, Google manages Disney’s ad inventory across multiple platforms, which may very well also include YouTube. Since the two are in cahoots, this could mean that anything critical of Disney (i.e. “The Acolyte”) would come under far stricter moderation.
It would look terrible if your business partner was hosting the most outspoken critics without moderation, so it could be that Google is censoring criticism against their god-awful show on Disney’s behalf or even at their behest. It would look even worse if you were paying the people creating the criticisms through ad content, which the focus of Disney and Google’s partnership.
I want to reiterate that I have no concrete proof that this is what’s happening, but it may explain why YouTube is going harder on criticism of Disney content than others. Your free speech is too expensive.
Not that anyone would be surprised if this is exactly what’s happening. YouTube has a habit of censoring videos for a variety of reasons, even if they don’t break TOS. YouTube did the same thing with videos critical of Hillary Clinton, including one pro-Clinton author who detailed a relationship between Clinton and Google that ran very deep.
YouTube censoring someone critical of one of their partners is hardly outside the realm of possibility.
Anyway, here’s my Rumble channel.
