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Comment by the_only_law | Hacker News Reader

The insane part to me is just that the bar for killing content in YT is already so low, why don't they just kill it? I mean I was watching videos where people had to bleep the word "massacre" and hace been told by others that words like "incursion" and "Saladin" have to be censored else they run the risk of demonitized content.

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You're not allowed to discuss Saladin? The medieval Arab[0] general? Why not?

[0] correction: Kurdish, not Arab.

I'm not sure. I was told by a guy who does streaming for historical strategy games that this was a word he had to censor or else his vidoes got demonetized. Every single one of those words I listed could be discussed in a completely SFW, educational, historical context but I've either heard or heard of videos bleeping them. Perhaps its just hyper-caution on the side of the uploader.

Saladin was ethnically Kurdish, so I wonder if someone of Arab, Persian, or Turkish (or whatever other groups might have a historical beef with the Kurds) descent works at Youtube has an axe to grind. Or maybe the Crusades are considered a touchy subject by someone at Youtube?

Stuff like this has happened before, I remember a year or two ago on Twitter there was someone who was friends with someone on the moderation team at Twitter and got them to shut down anyone tweeting anything negative about them, I can't remember the details at the moment. Or years ago on Reddit you couldn't criticize a certain moderator that had a friend who was an admin for the site.

> Or maybe the Crusades are considered a touchy subject by someone at Youtube?

Or more plausibly and less conspiracy-esque, a company like YouTube will eventually come up with a formula like:

    threshold=1.5
    if hassle(topic) / threshold > revenue(topic):
        ban(topic)

I.e. maybe they don't care at all about the subject, but dealing with reported videos, comments, the PR impact from flamewars about a contentious subject etc. just isn't worth it.

All for a topic that's hard to monetize, easier just to ban it and move on.

These fake content farms are lucrative, it seems the demonetized items you're talking about are bad for advertisers. It's kind of like the stock market; you're not betting against what you believe, you're betting against what you think the general public will believe.

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