Exposing YouTube's Hold On Narrative Control

Another inside scoop on YouTube's shady censorship and narrative control tactics.

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Last time I wrote about an inside look into YouTube’s re-education program ;)

Essentially they offered me the opportunity to take a training course that would teach me about their “community guidelines“ program (as if I don’t already know). In exchange, they would remove the final warning on our YouTube account for The Pulse.

Long story short, we’ve never actually broken their community guidelines per YouTube’s admission, yet somehow our account was deleted, re-instated, and yet still has a warning. The full story is here.

Today I want to briefly talk about the next phase of exploration that I am doing for fun in my free time.

I’ve been engaging with a real person at YouTube, trying to find out why we were snubbed for our 100,000 subscriber creator award 3 years ago. My hope is through this inquiry, I will get more insight into what happens behind the scenes at YouTube to blacklist accounts. More on that shortly.

What Happened With Our Channel

Firstly, this story is about our Collective Evolution YouTube channel, not The Pulse.

For those who don’t know, since 2009 we operated primarily as Collective Evolution. In 2021, after 5 years of incredible smearing and censorship, we created The Pulse to try and escape the witch hunt.

Sticking to relevant details here, on our CE YouTube account, we had been stuck at 95K subscribers for years. Eventually, we put a little extra focus on YouTube and hit 100K on Oct 20, 2020.

At 100K subscribers creators are supposed to receive one of those silver creator awards that everyone gets. They are nice looking and grant social proof and credibility to a channel. You get one of these providing the channel meets YouTube’s criteria.

Things like no copyright strikes, 100K subs, no community guideline strikes, you are still active on your account etc. We easily met all of these guidelines.

Yet months went by and we never got our award. For months in 2020, I didn’t think about it. But in 2021 I became more curious to find out if someone would bluntly tell me what was going on with our channel. So for the heck of it in 2021, I put in a request for the award to see what would happen.

That request was ignored.

Now is the time to understand a bit more of history here. Two events occurred before being snubbed for our award.

1. In 2019 YouTube sneakily removed us from their search results and heavily cut our video traffic.

2. In May 2020 we were removed from Google search. (Google owns YouTube)

The 2019 Move: You can see in the graph below that when we used to make content on YouTube, it did well and got a lot of views. Then we woke up on Jan 1, 2019, and everything had been shut off.

Our video views were metered to the low dribble you see because CE stopped showing up in feeds, searches, and recommendations. Interestingly, on May 1st, 2020, you could no longer get results searching “collective evolution” on YouTube.

YouTube censorship.

The 2020 Move: The graph below is Google search console data. You can see we were getting 25,000 to 35,000 impressions a day from Google searches. This was going on for YEARS. You earn this by being a high-quality website that produces content people want. We also happened to be ranked in the top 1000 websites in the world (that’s insane traffic), so we had a lot of authority to land in Google search. The crowd had spoken: people wanted our content.

Enter Google…We can see on May 1, 2020, Google systematically removed us from their search results. This means when people search for things, CE is no longer recommended.

Google dusts us from search results.

The summary of this suggests YouTube didn’t like our brand and wanted to shut us out. We can guess all day long, and perhaps it’s painfully obvious, but in transparency, we never learned why Google did this.

We had never received a violation, guideline strike, or copyright strike. Our account was in perfect standing and sparkling clean.

Further, our video content made good money for their YouTube Partner program. That supports both us and YouTube.

Nonetheless, CE was shadow-banned. This, in my mind, is worse than being outright banned because when you are outright banned people can see and verify that. But when you are shadow-banned, people don’t know nor do they believe you.

The Current YouTube Award Situation

OK, with that context in mind, I reached out to YouTube recently to find out for real why we didn’t get an award.

To be honest, I did this for a mix of reasons. I want a straight answer from YouTube about what we did “wrong.” I don’t think it’s fair to be sent to jail without being charged with anything and not knowing why you’re there.

I also never really felt like I, or my ideas, have been accepted by greater society. Sure, I get that is part of being different, but it still creates pain. I’ve lost almost everything doing what I love, and I don’t think it’s fair. I still seek connection and to be heard. I am likely acting from this pain point as well.

I began my exploration by doing an eligibility check for our award. Google’s eligibility checker recognized we meet all the criteria YouTube outlines for the award, but for some reason, their automated checker returned a result that said some information was missing and I needed to reach out to Google/YouTube directly.

So I reached out to a live chat person. This was wild because you NEVER used to be able to talk to a real person at YouTube or Google.

I asked them why our channel hadn’t received an award given we met all the criteria years ago. At first, I was congratulated for all my hard work in getting to this milestone.

Zayn then said he’d check into this issue for me. 3 minutes later he came back a little confused.

A specialist eh? I guess this is a tough case ;)

This should be a straight yes or no situation. We either qualify or we don’t. But back there Zayn was seeing something that was not allowing us to get an award. What was he seeing? I don’t know. But I’ve heard stories of extensive blacklisting and shadow banning options on the backend of accounts, I can only imagine that’s what he saw.

As you can see I tried to ask about the confusion, yet you’ll see in the message below he glosses over this.

So far, it’s what I expected.

Something is clearly being seen on the backend of our account that is not triggering an award, and even a lower-level customer service person isn’t sure how to deal with the situation.

Thinking about this, ours is a channel that has been manually sought out and systematically censored. What the heck could he be seeing back there that urges him to move to a specialist to get answers?

Narrative Control

In my essay yesterday I spoke about the illusion people operate under about the reality of our society. Many believe that the news is truthful, that their governments care about them, and that democracy exists in their country. These are true when you believe in that fantasy.

But a look at the truth, as also recognized by Teddy Roosevelt (see my essay), behind the government exists an unelected force that controls major levers in society. Governments, media, education, infrastructures, policy etc. I’m not suggesting some unstoppable monolithic control, but more so influences that we don’t see nor recognize until we look more closely.

This is exactly how YouTube is helping to shape public opinion falsely. By removing CE from its search, by not recommending us, and by not validating our work via things like awards, we disappear into the abyss. We don’t come up as an option for people to see as credible, and thus public opinion is shaped by more mainstream views.

What’s Next

We’ll see what YouTube says about their reasoning. As I stated, hearing it from them would be somewhat satisfying.

I cannot tell you how terrible it feels to put your heart and soul into building a baby (my company) for years on end only to have it wholesale rejected by society all while you never get a clear reason as to why because Big Tech companies are too big of cowards to tell you.

Facebook, YouTube, Google, and fact checkers have all combined to destroy a once thriving business. I’d love some answers even though I don’t entirely expect to get them. Perhaps whatever I do uncover will provide more insight into the depths of the censorship industrial complex. Or perhaps this is just another cathartic exercise as I move on from my past.