I’m Sick and Tired of Content Creators Trying to Navigate YouTube’s Opaque Guntube Content Standards

Watching guntube has increasingly become obnoxious because of the stupid “code words” creators have to use to not offend the robot moderators. I regularly see videos where several seconds of the start are the creator essentially talking to the AI and promising they aren’t doing anything illegal or directing viewers to gun seller websites (which isn’t illegal!).

Often content creators get unexplained strikes anyway, with no real way to appeal unless you’re a huge channel. Entire channels can be wiped out this way, taking years of irreplaceable content with them.

YouTube is either a bunch of anti-gunners themselves or cowards who folded to the pressure of Michael Bloomberg to slowly kill off legal gun content. Either way, they’re not true believers in free speech, and certainly not the right to keep and bear arms.

YouTube should be ashamed of themselves. The rules should be rolled back to whatever they were ten years ago when guntube thrived. Only illegal content should be against the rules. And if they don’t want to allow firearms on livestreams, fine. I can understand that one.

Everytown and their friends in the gun control industry correctly identified guntube as a threat to their war on America’s gun culture and have lobbied hard to destroy it. For now, they’re winning that battle.

I think YouTube will eventually use a mass shooting as an excuse to finally ban guntube entirely, aside from maybe purely educational stuff e.g. Forgotten Weapons and channels that discuss court cases and such.

I know we’ve already asked a lot of him, but I wish Elon could turn X into an actually viable video platform. Right now, you can upload videos but there’s no real way to easily find them if they aren’t very recent. Scum like Michael Bloomberg and his paid minions know they’re losing the culture war and they can’t hope to beat us in an actual grassroots battle. So instead, they lean on their sympathetic corporate buddies and apply pressure to advertisers to force top-down change.

A simple change to the law could be that to enjoy the protections of Section 230, platforms must have a human appeals process when they take action against accounts over a certain number of followers or subscribers. The number can be pegged at 25,ooo, 50,000, something reasonable like that. It can’t be set too high or only the huge channels would benefit from the change to the law.

For example, if a creator so chooses, there should be a recorded interview with a human moderator who explains why the channel got a strike, was suspended or banned. The creator would then be allowed to argue their case. They’d get a copy of the recording at the end so they can share it.

Hiding behind algorithms and vague rules is obnoxious considering that we grant these assholes massive legal liability protections based on the premise that they are allegedly value-free conduits for creators’ speech. Perhaps these private platforms can’t be held to a maximal First Amendment-level standard, but they should certainly he held to a higher standard than they are now.

Kostas Moros is Director of Legal Research and Education for the Second Amendment Foundation.

I’m Sick and Tired of Content Creators Trying to Navigate YouTube’s Opaque Guntube Content Standards

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