YouTube has just informed me that my channel has been permanently demonetized — not just a 90-day suspension as I had previously been told. There is no possibility for redress, they say. It’s a lifetime ban on making any more income through this major streaming platform. I’m shaking involuntarily.
I posted the above paragraph on Facebook earlier today and a lot of people in the comments said very nice things and asked repeatedly why this happened, so given that there's now a fairly dramatic update to discuss, let's do it.
But first of all, for those of you who might not get to the end of this post, I am being deleted from the internet bit by bit, on all the sorts of platforms where this tends to happen to "controversial" people. There are alternative platforms that are, for now, less susceptible to this kind of thing, but they are akin to replacing the smooth highways with bumpy dirt roads. You can drive on them, but few people will be doing it with you. I am on those other platforms, and in this time when I'm being deleted from the big ones, I need your support more than ever in order to keep writing, recording, and touring. If you want to help me do that in this time of demonetization and deletion, and you're able to and not already doing it, you can sign up as a patron on Patreon, as a paid subscriber on Substack, or directly via my website at davidrovics.com/subscribe.
In the fall of 2023 I posted a Houthi Army press release after Yemen was bombed by the US and the UK, because I had written a song on the subject and was otherwise posting about this conflict. A week ago someone apparently flagged this video, and YouTube took it down and notified me that my account was demonetized for 90 days. They said the demonetization would end if I didn't commit any further violations, and if I took a short "training."
I took the "training," which was basically an explanation of what kinds of videos are acceptable and what kinds aren't, with regards to sharing videos, or clips of videos, put out by proscribed organizations. I had apparently violated this policy by not contextualizing the Houthi video in the video itself (rather than in the description), and by not condemning the Houthis in the process of contextualizing the video, if I understood the training correctly.
Then today I got another email from YouTube that my channel was permanently demonetized. I got in touch with them on chat, and a nice YouTube employee looked up my account and confirmed that there was nothing to be done, my account was permanently demonetized.
This is all happening the day after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be ending their efforts at content moderation in the US. I just checked, and it does seem like my Facebook account may no longer be overtly restricted. At least, I just created a Facebook Event and successfully used the Invite function to invite people to it, twice in a row, with only one error message in the process.
It's the algorithms -- what "goes viral" and what doesn't -- that have approximately a million times more impact than anything any of their content moderation teams ever do, however, and the algorithms are never part of the debate.
If YouTube is planning on following Facebook's new "anything goes" approach to content moderation, my permanent demonetization from their platform might indicate they're not going that route yet.
This of course all comes in the wake of Spotify deleting my most popular album of 2024 from my discography, from anyone's playlists where any of the songs on the album, Notes from a Holocaust, were present, and from existence, generally, so that any mention of the album or the tens of thousands of streams it got were not part of my 2024 #SpotifyWrapped at all, as if it never was.
What I am talking about here are more or less the trifecta of platforms that are of paramount importance to any working musician today -- YouTube, Facebook, and Spotify. It would be impossible to overstate how crucial these platforms are for musicians to be heard in today's world, to develop or sustain an audience, to promote gigs, and to earn income.
What's especially alarming about the way all of these platforms seem to enforce rules is the way they are unaccountable, opaque, and completely ham-fisted in their approach. I committed one violation over a year ago, and so my whole YouTube account is demonetized for life. I recorded one song that perhaps violates their rules, and so Spotify deleted the entire album it's on, with no notification or explanation. I did whatever it was I did that bothered Facebook, and they restricted my account severely and blatantly for half a year at least, again with no notification or explanation.
It's hard to even imagine how severe the impact of the content rules these platforms are enforcing is having on any efforts anyone might want to have to engage in any kind of real discourse on important subjects of global significance, such as the war between the US, the UK, and the Houthi Army that is currently ongoing.
Any praise of the Houthis I make in a song or in any other form is illegal, let's be very clear about that. It is illegal to say, write, or sing anything positive about this group that is trying to stop Israel's genocide of the Palestinians by sanctioning trade on Israel, by force of arms when necessary. Yes, really, this is illegal. Not necessarily in the US, but in the UK -- it violates the Terrorism Act of 2000 and could result in me getting a 14-year prison sentence there at some point, theoretically.
Though praising the Houthi Army isn't illegal in the US, to my knowledge, as far as the speech of it goes, profiting from a song praising the Houthi Army may be another matter altogether, or at least that may be what people at YouTube who decided to permanently demonetize my channel were thinking -- who knows. I'm just guessing that this may be why they demonetized the channel, rather than deleting it altogether.
It's already a gigantic problem for all of us that lies and slander and disinformation tend to get seen so much more than anything else on these platforms, because of the way the platforms work, the way "virality" works on such platforms, and the way their algorithms work. But if we can't even attempt to have a conversation without some of us having albums deleted and channels demonetized, the whole thing is skewed even more in the direction of a social media landscape in which only those who hold sufficiently establishment views on proscribed organizations may speak, or be heard.
If it's true that one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter -- and it is, including in the particular case of Ansar Allah, aka the Houthi Army -- then you're increasingly unlikely to discover this truth on YouTube.
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