YouTube Shadowbans Video Critical of Anti-Semitism
On October 19th, 2018, Liberalist content creator Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad) uploaded a video to his fourth channel The Thinkery titled Black Identitarians Attack The Jews. The video features a clip of Louis Farrakhan referring to himself as “anti-termite” as opposed to an anti-semite, followed by commentary critical of the video clip.
YouTube’s algorithm then immediately placed the video in a state best described as “shadowbanning” (suppression of content in a deceptive way that’s not clearly stated).
YouTube’s algorithm can place videos in a limited-state, which is clearly stated and blocks certain video features including likes, comments, and its appearance in search results. This video is not in such state, but is still restricted. The video does not appear under The Thinkery channel’s ‘Uploads’ list, nor the ‘All Videos’ list.
The video does show up as a search result when searching for either the video name or the channel name, but the thumbnail is blank.
Mr. Benjamin then uploaded another video on The Thinkery channel about the shadowban, titled This Video has been Shadowbanned, which appears as a normal video.
Whether this is intentional, or a problem with YouTube’s algorithm, is not known. Google (and thus YouTube) has a policy against hate speech, and implementing this can be difficult and often counterproductive as algorithms struggle to determine the difference between prejudice and criticism of prejudice. The hidden video falls into the latter category.
What is unusual is the nature of the restriction. YouTube does not have any clear policy stating that videos will be restricted in this format. The only noticeable difference between this video and others is its lack of thumbnail in search results and lack of appearance within the channel page.
About The Author:
Nathan A. Kreider is the founder of NAKhub Media and columnist at Being Libertarian. His articles have also appeared at the Foundation for Economic Education, The Lock Haven Express, and The Liberalists, as well as his own website, nkreider.com.
