Seriously youtube, WTF?
(Pictured L-R; The GLORY HOLE star Philip Richardson, cohost Ruttegar Mannequine and show creator Dave O’Shea, seated and plotting revenge. Photo credit: Kerry Doss)
SERIOUSLY, youtube. What the F**K?
Hi, kids! Haven’t posted on here in a while but, well, something came up.
For those who don’t know me, I’m Dave O’Shea, an independent filmmaker and artist in San Francisco. VERY independent. I've written, produced, directed, edited and occasionally acted in dozens of self-funded microbudget productions over the past 15+ years, including an award winning horror feature (DAY JOB), numerous short films and a late night public access sketch comedy series called The GLORY HOLE which has been airing in San Francisco and various Bay Area cities for the past six years and counting.
Like most underground filmmakers striving to gain a broader audience, I've been posting many of my creations on youtube for well over a decade. Trailers for my films, clips and ads promoting my TV show, cultural mini-documentaries, music videos I've shot, random comedy and animated shorts, anything and everything. Not only is it the most visible platform out there, it's easily the best way for artists like myself to put our work out there--to be seen, enjoyed and possibly even to get us discovered by the ‘gatekeepers’ and advance our careers. Nothing I’ve posted has gone ‘viral’ per se, but I’ve accumulated tens of thousands of views over the years, which ain’t bad for a virtual unknown.
As a purveyor mainly of horror and dark comedy, much of the content I create is confrontational, subversive, provocative, political and deeply satirical. The intent with my current project, The GLORY HOLE, is to blend the most ridiculously absurd premises with topics that I'm genuinely passionate about, both pro- and against. There's a recurring bit throughout the series where our host (Phil Richardson) complains about some insane situation currently going on in the country and he stares right into the camera and chastises, "Just Stop It, America! You're Embarrassing Yourself!" Targets frequently include racism, religious fanaticism, disposable fads, nationalism, police brutality and good ol’ American stupidity in general. No shortage of any of the above to throw artistic stones at in 2023, sadly.
On the absurdism side, the show's cohost is a mannequin named Ruttegar who speaks exclusively in static fuzz and random bleeps, yet the host always knows exactly what he's talking about. He's a drug addict, a shameless womanizer and sometimes murderer. And a mannequin. I did mention he's a mannequin, right? Okay.
The show, which airs uncensored late at night (Fridays at 11pm in San Francisco on SF Commons Channel 29 and Hayward on Chabot TV Channel 28, streaming online at www.bavc.org/sfcommons), occasionally includes brief nudity or sexual situations (99% of which involve crudely produced cartoon animation or the aforementioned mannequin) and mild comedic violence--always for a laugh, never remotely what anyone in their right mind could consider pornographic or in any way harmful to any consenting adult viewer. That said, whenever I've posted a clip from the show on youtube involving anything sexual or with, for example, an exposed butt cheek or (gasp!) a female breast, I've always gone out of my way to cover them with either a censor bar or blur them out. Seemed pretty simple to me; youtube doesn't allow nudity. Got it. No problem. Moving on.
Over the past year but in rapid succession over the past few months especially, I've been randomly receiving notifications saying youtube had flagged a video, adding an '18+ Age Restriction' on it. Their notification reads, in part: "We have reviewed your content and determined that it may not be suitable for viewers under the age of 18, per our Community Guidelines... We haven't applied a strike to your channel [remember this part, it's important]... This means it will not be visible to viewers who are logged out, are under 18 years of age, or have Restricted Mode enabled."
While sometimes I felt the restriction was arguably fair, other times they were objectively wrong, and clearly applied by an AI bot. But, so as not to rock the boat, I just let it go. Never argued with them.
The real downside is these restrictions cause much lower viewership and engagement. I liken it to a shadowban on instagram, they don’t delete the content, but they keep just about anyone who isn’t actively engaged with your page or sent a direct link from seeing it. Even still, I'm a 'pick your battles' kinda guy, and these didn’t seem all that big a deal. After all, youtube's own policy states that a user’s page would only be at risk of termination after receiving 3 strikes for violating their rules, and right there in black and white in my notifications, they said they had not applied any strikes. None. Never once.
Back to The GLORY HOLE. Production on the upcoming second season of the show began in June of 2021 and wrapped in June of this year. To put it mildly, it was quite an undertaking, as all microbudget productions tend to be. As of the time of this writing, 11 of the 12 new episodes are complete and one just has some minor tweaking to finish up. And it’s a huge step up from the previous season in every imaginable way; the storytelling, performances, music, animation and editing, everything. Safe to say everyone involved is super proud of what we’ve accomplished and can’t wait to share it with our beautiful “fans” and hopefully earn lots of new ones.
In preparation for launching this new season, I spent much of this past June through mid-July combing through the first season of the show, editing more than thirty 2-3 minute ‘Best Of’ clips to share on youtube to send to the press, podcasts, etc., and to share with loyal fans who may enjoy a refresher before diving into the new material. On July 13th I uploaded the final handful of these bite sized videos, a couple of which were immediately flagged as Age Restricted/18+ (clearly AI-bots doing the flagging, as they hadn’t even finished uploading), but again, nothing out of the ordinary and seemingly no big deal. I repeat, per youtube’s own wording, Age Restricted videos do NOT put your channel at risk of termination.
So when I found the notification that they HAD, in fact, terminated my page in my email the next morning, without warning, claiming I had violated their community guidelines involving nudity, I immediately knew it was not a human who decided this. Why? Because I have never, ever posted anything involving exposed nudity whatsoever on the public youtube page. As I mentioned, I’d spent countless hours over the years animating censor bars to make sure nothing that could be considered nudity ended up on their public platform. Yes, even on the mannequin. I was that ridiculously careful.
After immediately filling out and submitting an appeal (the first of THREE thus far), I reached out on my social media to see if anyone knew someone who worked at youtube that I could be put in contact with. Having heard a bit in the past about how dismissively youtube treats small independent creators, I knew it would be wise to get some help.
A good friend put me in touch with someone there and I messaged him on one of his socials.
To his credit, this gentleman spent over a week reaching out to others within the company, attempting to initiate some sort of correspondence with whichever department may be able to assist. It should also be noted that youtube has virtually NO WAY to contact an actual human on their website, which is clearly by design. At one point, he asked for my personal email so he could add me in on an email thread with his manager. Seemed almost promising at this point...
Then a few more days passed. Then the weekend. No email received. I messaged again the following week, asking when I might expect to hear from the manager so we can begin to discuss how to fix this situation. All I wanted was to have a conversation and was totally open to whatever compromises we could agree on, even if that meant deleting some of the videos off the channel.
Then, I suspect prompted by his manager, he asked a very telling couple of questions about my terminated account:
a) How many subscribers did I have?
and b) Was I a youtube business partner/did I run ads on my videos?
And right then it clicked.
What they were really asking was:
-Am I famous or important enough to have a conversation with?
-Do I make them money?
When I expressed that I had a small but loyal fanbase (couple hundred subscribers at best) and no, I did not run ads on my videos, the manager suddenly didn’t have time to discuss anything with me. Shocking, right?
Couple more days of radio silence again and finally he wrote back saying he’d heard through the grapevine that my page was terminated for being “too edgy” for their platform, but was given no details beyond that.
I’m sorry, but how is being “edgy” a violation of youtube’s community guidelines? Forgive me for pointing out their blatant hypocrisy, but a platform that proudly showcases sexually graphic music videos with titles like “Wet Ass Pussy” and SNL skits like “Dick In A Box” (not to mention fully uncensored anal waxing videos, countless videos of police murdering unarmed people of color, brutal street violence, endless bullying, misogyny and bloody war footage, etc, etc, etc.), somehow my COMEDY videos with the sarcastic host and the mannequin sidekick is where they draw the line? Sure thing, youtube.
It’s crystal clear what they meant was they don’t like my material since I don’t generate ad revenue for them. This performative morality horseshit from a platform which literally gave rise to the mainstreaming of the American alt-right, let thousands of unhinged users to spread deadly misinformation during the covid 19 pandemic and continually allows harmful propaganda and racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic material, is nothing short of laughable.
[Side note: Alex Winter’s brilliant new documentary, The Youtube Effect, is essential viewing for those interested in how little they care about anything beyond raking in BILLIONS off the backs of its creators while fanning the flames of hatred and division. The recurring theme of the film is youtube simply does not care about who they harm. And why would they?]
In the weeks since this all started, I’ve done quite a bit of poking around online and I’ve seen a ton of evidence that my situation is not at all unique. It seems that the past couple of years in particular, youtube has been on a performative witch hunt of sorts, using any excuse to terminate channels that don’t perform for them, financially. Especially those with “edgy” content that may offend the religious right or other groups who organize and complain about whatever doesn’t fit into their puritanical, bigoted view of what constitutes acceptable material. They even took down legendary independent film studio Troma’s page just a few weeks before mine. Below is what they posted on instagram when it first happened:
Key sentence: “We have received a response from the Youtube team, and they have made it quite clear that independent art has no business on their platform.” Troma eventually got their page reinstated but only after weeks of thousands of their fans taking to twitter and an online petition DEMANDING they give it back. Which only highlights that youtube CAN do the right thing, but likely only will when it’s convenient or if too many people are pointing out their fully transparent hypocrisy in a public forum. It's now been a full month since my channel was effectively banned from youtube. I've submitted 3 separate appeals, ZERO of which have garnered anything beyond an automated 'received, thank you for your patience' response. Besides the unofficial correspondence with the employee, the only official interaction I've received from what *could* be an actual human has been on twitter. Seems pretty interesting to me that I've had to go to another platform to actually hear back from anyone. But still, they just say be patient and wait for the decision.
And upon further inspection of the @TeamYoutube twitter page, their responses all appear to be cut and paste, so it’s most likely AI bots responding there as well. They claim in their automated responses that a decision whether or not to reinstate a suspended/terminated channel “should take 1-2 business days.” Well, it's been four weeks... and counting.
SERIOUSLY, youtube. What the F**K???
If you’d like to support me and my work going forward, please follow:
instagram.com/diabloshea for all the latest updates and happenings
vimeo.com/diabloshea where you can watch some of what youtube unjustly deleted RIGHT NOW!
The GLORY HOLE returns with ALL NEW episodes Fridays at 11pm pacific, starting in September! Watch HERE
Thanks for reading,
DO