Five Years, Gone by Morning
Five years. Every week, a new video. A channel called Open Mind, built to over 320,000 subscribers by a creator named Simon. Then one hemp-related upload, one automated strike, and it was gone. His summary: it’s just really excessive, when you think about which videos got the channel deleted.
Around the same time, Kilian—who runs the streaming channel Tanzverbot—woke up to find a community guidelines strike applied to a video he’d uploaded two years earlier. Core platform features locked. Growth tools disabled. I woke up in a good mood and this is really fucking me up, getting torn apart for a two-year-old video,
he said. I think it’s over with YouTube now.
The context is a Wall Street Journal investigation that exposed YouTube’s ad systems running alongside terrorist content and far-right extremism. Advertisers pulled budgets. American creators made noise. PewDiePie got labeled a Nazi by the press. Google, which owns YouTube, did what corporations do when revenue is threatened: it started optimizing aggressively for advertiser comfort, which means treating anything ambiguous as a liability.
Simon’s hemp video and Kilian’s old clip had nothing to do with the original scandal. But they were there, and they were deletable, and the algorithm doesn’t care about proportionality.
For years, YouTube ran on a fiction of creator-partnership—a platform that built careers, rewarded consistency, gave room to people the mainstream had no use for. The fiction served both sides. Creators built content at scale; YouTube captured the economic value. Now that the advertiser layer is under pressure, the fiction is dropped. What remains is a company sorting its content library toward brand safety, which means clearing out the media-critical, the scandalous, the youth-oriented provocateurs—exactly the channels that actually drive cultural conversation on the platform.
The cruelty isn’t that there are rules. It’s that they’re applied randomly. Not systematically against a specific content category, but arbitrarily against whichever channels are easy to hit. The genuinely dangerous accounts have lawyers and audiences and political cover. Simon had five years of weekly uploads and no recourse.
Anyone building a creative livelihood on YouTube is building on land they don’t own. The platform controls access to the audience. You just borrow it until they decide otherwise.