YouTube Restricted Our Kyle Rittenhouse Documentary. We Still Don’t Know Why.

Twitter Files revealed severe corruption of one of the largest content distribution sites on the internet. ideological bias. According to leaked documents, Twitter employees were seen altering distribution algorithms and suspending accounts for political reasons. The Right always suspected Twitter wasn’t a fair forum; the Twitter Files proved it.

The Right has had similar concerns about YouTube for a long time. YouTube has an estimated monthly user base in excess of 500,000. 2.6 billion compared Twitter’s estimated 368 million Monthly users. Critics tend not to focus on the obvious acts censorship: Bannedding videos or shutting down channels without any apparent reason, other than that they offend liberal sensibilities. Alternative video hosting sites like Rumble have emerged to provide Right-wing and heterodox voices a censorship-free platform, but the audiences for those sites remain a microscopic fraction of YouTube’s.

My company Good Kid ProductionsYouTube appears to have used censorship to silence dissident voices. “community safety.”

Our channel was launched late last year. documentary Two viral stories that are well-known in Kenosha, Wisconsin were investigated: the shooting of Jacob Blake (a black man) by a police officer in 2020 and the subsequent violence of BLM riots which resulted in the deaths of two other people by Kyle RittenhouseA young man who brought an AR-15-style rifle with him to Kenosha to protect his private business.

YouTube management left the video unaffected for four weeks, allowing it continue to gain views. YouTube suddenly and without warning, designated the video as “Unknown” in December. “age-restricted.” 

This is supposed to be an automatic yellow-card penalty. This is a yellow-card punishment. Videos are given this designation for violating “community guidelines,” The rules were vaguely stated to protect the platform from inappropriate, violent, sexual, dangerous or other offensive content. The “age-restricted” designation doesn’t fully nuke the video: It gets to stay up, but under restrictions that, in theory, simply prevent it from reaching an underage audience.

In practice, age restriction is a death knell: The video can’t be embedded on external websites; viewers have to sign in before they can watch it; and it receives scant – if any – boost from YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which is a crucial source of views.

A documentary deconstructing the media’s coverage of a police shooting and the resulting mass riots is, admittedly, going to contain some mature themes. However, all the “mature” Visuals are from publicly available news articles, which are also freely accessible on YouTube. The violence isn’t graphic. It’s the sort that might make PBS News. There’s no blood, guts, or sex, and there’s just a single use of profanity (by a BLM activist). And YouTube’s community guidelines explicitly carve out exceptions for news pieces, which is exactly what our documentary is.

The original age restriction notice did not specify the part or parts that were problematic so we had to guess how it could be fixed. YouTube has native editing tools that allow channel managers to modify videos after they’ve been published. They were used to reduce gun violence. Then, we submitted an appeal. This appeal is supposed be overseen in person.

We received a reply on January 1, from “Emman” YouTube Support informing Us “a human reviewer re-evaluated your content and determined that it does violate our Community Guidelines. We know this is probably disappointing news, but it’s our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all.” 

That’s it for the explanation. Emman didn’t provide specifics. He? it?) didn’t tell us what triggered the original designation or what doomed our appeal. YouTube is likely to receive thousands of appeals every day. We’re not expecting a detailed report; we just want to know what specifically the human reviewer saw that made them rule to retain the restriction.

We asked Emman what parts of the video needed to be changed to remove the restriction. Emman responded on January 12: “I understand that you would like to blur out your video, and have them [sic] be reviewed again. Unfortunately, if the video is already reviewed by our internal team the decision is final regardless if the video is edited or not.”

And that’s it. There is no next step. The video has seen very few views. It’s been shared by several large social media accounts, each with millions of followers, but the age restriction is a traffic choke point, substantially squeezing down the audience generated by those shares.

There’s no definitive proof this restriction is political, but it’s hard not to be suspicious. Our documentary exposes the leftist lies Silicon Valley is spreading about race, police, and other issues. What revelations would a Twitter Files-like reveal about YouTube’s internal communications? What percentage of these restrictions are arbitrary?

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