Three years and four million views after upload, today YouTube has age-restricted my video “Incels.” Age-restriction significantly reduces a video’s visibility, requiring viewers to be logged in and over 18 to watch, and suppressing it in the recommendation algorithm.

YouTube’s community guidelines are supposed to make it clear to creators what content is allowed on the platform. But the guidelines are enforced very arbitrarily (actually, worse than arbitrarily—video restriction/removal is often triggered by an easily abused flagging system)

Randomly enforced restrictions are more restrictive than ones that are consistently enforced. If enforcement is consistent, you know what the rules are, and you can work around them. But arbitrary enforcement forces you into superstitious, neurotic self-censorship

You don’t know what exactly you can get away with, so you start bleeping, blurring, and omitting anything that could possibly be evocative of sex, drugs, violence, profanity, hate speech, or bullying. This is bad for art.

Suppose you’re a history YouTuber. Can you show images of Nazi Germany for educational purposes (images often shown in school to under-18s)? According the the community guidelines yes, but in practice such videos are often restricted or removed for “hate speech.”

Suppose you’re a feminist or sex educator. Can you say the words pornography, rape, clitoris? YouTube is often the only chance to educate teenagers about these topics before PornHub does. But on YouTube, this kind of content is very often age-restricted.

Because most of my funding comes from @Patreon, I’m in the fortunate position of not being financially reliant on the erratic whims of this broken system. So I can afford to take risks. But most creators aren’t so lucky.

Free speech should be reclaimed as an essential leftist issue. We should not surrender the most fundamental civil right to Google LLC in the name of deplatforming rightists and curtailing harassment. It’s not worth the cost.