Censorship is more insulting than no censorship (to me)
Does anyone have a fear of censorship? Anybody? Well I do, and it's getting worse for me because of the ever growing sanitization of the internet. It started first with YouTube's age restriction feature in 2014. People thought it was one of the worst things, but something even worse happened. PewDiePie fucked up (twice) resulting in these stupid monetization policies that forced people into safe, bland "content" that prioritizes advertising over authenticity. Everything had to be "advertiser friendly."
The word "advertiser-friendly" sounds disgusting, especially when it comes into the play of hypocrisy where a YouTuber who makes videos don't like ads, especially the garbage predatory kind on YouTube and a bunch of other mobile apps, yet they want to maintain that ad-revenue that creatively limits them, so what they got is ads in a video sponsored by any scam product imaginable. Every censorship in these YouTube videos post-2017 just hurts a lot.
It doesn't matter if the policies got more lenient, what matters is that people should "fuck" uncensored more than one or three times instead of speaking sponsors.
The issue got more prominent in 2018 when everyone was giving up their creative freedom for ad-revenue that I had to unsubscribe to most people. I was hoping Tumblr would be safe from censorship, but that wasn't the case at all.
Every time I think of Tumblr, I feel sorry for the people whose blogs and posts got removed due to the purge. Most people think that Tumblr was some "bad website" for mostly dumb reasons, but they're missing the forest from the trees. It was NOT a site for "SJWs" or whatever derogatory word, it was way way WAY more than what the average idiot assumes. Tumblr was a good website because it was accessible to discovering many various cultures. It's not only fandom users who used to use it. Graphic designers, musicians, writers, sculptors, and any creative hobby were part of that site. If you were to ignore and block away the drama, the experience would be great.
But then the porn ban came. Everything was erased by bots, and archivers were blocked from preserving the blogs. It was the burning of the Library of Alexandria tenfold. It was the worst Christmas gift ever. I can't say more about nor look back at it nor visit it nor want to see the word Tumblr again because it would just make me cry about that whole purge ruining everything. "queerest place on the internet" my ass, there are hundreds of TERFs, and the CEO banned a trans staff member.
Come 2020 with COVID killing everyone, YouTube got way fucking worse with these bots. These bots don't know the difference between a joke or something harmful. Videos containing anything edgy got taken down. To be flat out honest, I like edgy humor, and maybe a few of the offensive humor. I may be black, queer and autistic all at once, but I still miss most of the rudeness in internet comedy.
I love such progressive media with Celeste and especially Steven Universe the most, but I also love Drawn Together and Filthy Frank.
There's this big hypocrisy where people on YouTube make jokes that ridicule nazis and how shitty they are, but its bots assumes that we're promoting "violent criminal organizations" when they were explicitly being AGAINST "violent criminal organizations" in the first place. What, we can't say "it's okay to punch nazis", but it's fine for youtubers to spread actual nazi dogwhistles and get away with it? It's pure raw bullshit on so many levels. It's similar to when people get their videos taken down for making a 9/11 joke yet people who spread stupid conspiracies on 9/11 get away with it.
The videos I want to watch are now edited with the good parts cut out or blurred out, as if my memory had been altered to forget the things I loved. It happened the same for videos that used to have sex jokes or violence uncensored before they got taken down. It just ruins everything and makes archiving videos way harder. This just sucks a whole lot, it makes me want to vomit.
There are various reasons edginess has been toned down recently. The good reasons are the sense of being more mindful of what's happening, and we got sick of all these stereotypes fabricated from cishet dudebro cultures. The bad reasons are internet puritans, or puriteens, the kind who write callouts over something miniscule. The kind who have no media literacy whatsoever. The kind who get angry over President Jimbles or Blitzø saying a slur more than what's actually concerning like Kid Rock making an ass out of himself throwing a slur at people who wear masks or are homosexual. The kind who can't tell between fiction and reality.
There's also TERFs, puritans but way more evil such as J.K. "Thatcher" Voldemort. Their "activist" organizations such as Exodus Cry and Collective Shout are reasons why we're signing petitions and calling payment processors to stop banning any further pornography. They came for NicoVideo, Steam and Itch, and they'll come for you and everyone you'll love unless we stop those said TERFs.
Another bad reason is something most people don't notice. Corporates. There's a sense in a company wanting to keep a good image. If it's just getting rid of stuff that is actually harmful like pushing ACTUAL racist or queer-bashing ideologies or glorifying Neo-Nazism, that's fine. However, that isn't always the case when it comes to something like YouTube, because its lazy shortcut of using moderation bots to ban anything that's slightly off its corporate image instead of just using real humans really shoots itself in the foot many multiple times.
Those bots cannot tell between what's serious or what's a joke, and that issue spreads throughout with most social media platforms, especially TikTok where people get stupider by the minute. Remember the seven dirty words: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits? Now it's sex, masturbate, kill, porn, LGBTQ, lesbian and sex toy. In modern terms: seggs, goon, unalive, corn, leg booty, le dollar bean and spicy eggplant. It makes every sentence more childish and stupid, which is what ShitTok is doing to people's vocabulary and this whole damn internet. The term brainrot is not for the positive fandom obsession of one's favorite character or media anymore, it's for what TikTok shits out.
While I said I do miss edgy humor, I don't miss the actual bigotry that happened many years ago and is still happening today. We don't want any more fascism than we already have. I cross the line where the joke is directly harassing minorities in their faces, raiding servers, doxxing them, or doing that all at once. Same for the idea where the """""""joke"""""" is sending unsolicited snuff videos or child porn to people. That's not funny. That is just sick and inhumane. So no, I don't accept that "attack helicopter" crap.
You know? There is a running theme I'm starting to notice when writing this. I think it can be spelt out in a neat, simple and clean way.
BOTS
DO NOT
SOLVE
EVERYTHING
It never worked on Tumblr, it never worked on YouTube, it never worked anywhere. It made things worse.
All of this is why I have a fear of censorship. Everything that's happening along with the payment processor shit is a nightmare I cannot wake up from; it's like these companies are treating people like babies instead of acknowledging that there are lots of mature people. This is why I made that YouTube alternatives video and article to encourage people to make their own websites and get back their own creative freedom. YouTube is useful for clips and tutorials, but we really need spaces that fits best for creatives. Like if you hate what all these bots are doing to YouTube and other platforms, you really should be doing something about it. People are making petitions and calling paypros to stop banning further pornography, so you should do something with your own situation. No, not like changing your PFP to Clippy, I mean something with more action.
I don't know if YouTube or any other platform is ever going to get their shit together because their earplugs are too stuck to listen to all of our reasonable complaints, but there is the option of not dealing with one's bullshit and hitting the bricks. There already exist alternative platforms varying of functionality and quality. If the alternative platform's activity is small and quiet, then go promote it, recommend it to your friends or anybody. This applies to people using social media because third spaces and personal website are important for showcasing things without the fear of moderation bots.
I have my own website, because I want to have more freedom in what I want to talk about, and while doing that under a platform that's not bloated with scripts and trackers. There's also other things you can do like form archive projects for preserving creative videos and other media. Drama/commentary videos don't count as creative so don't bother. I'm really running on fumes writing this last paragraph, but all I want to say is that the internet shouldn't be sanitized into television, the very thing that we moved away from for various reasons, especially with limitations.