Demonetization on YouTube

A mostly victorious 12 months

When I started posting book reviews on the Palestine issue, my channel was not monetized, so, in a way, YouTube didn’t care what I posted about. Google has always been primarily an advertising company and as long as you help Google and its subsidiaries sell advertising, they are happy to let you use its services at “no cost.”

But within about 90 days of my first Ilan Pappe video the channel was monetized and so considerations of whether my content was “safe” or not began to be considered by the algorithms and humans behind YouTube (I had not yet started syncing my content to Odysee).

The way the process works for “objectionable content” is after you upload, a yellow dollar sign would appear in the studio app, notifying you that the algorithm, on “listening” to the audio, had judged your content not suitable for all advertisers. You could then check a box to request a manual review.

I checked that box 15 times in the last 12 months and won 13 of those appeals. Here are the headlines of the two that I lost:

I’ve come to believe, over time, that among the moderating team at YouTube, a majority are sympathizers with the Palestinian cause. The only two losses, i.e. permanently demonetized content, revolved around content that were not my own assertions, but simply reading either from an Israeli journalist (Gideon Levy) or from a news report about a planned Jewish terrorist attack in London. These videos were mostly likely moderated by the smaller number of Israeli sympathizers in the moderation team. You can’t win them all.

As I’ve continued to maintain, this current “cycle of violence” is different from the ones in the last 20 years because of the rise of social media and the fact that IDF soldiers gleefully post their war crimes online (masterfully captured in the Al-Jazeera documentary Investigating War Crimes in Gaza) and then hurriedly delete them (too late, already saved) after they are exposed. Israel has been right over the years that the Palestinians were a back-burner issue, leading even Norm Finkelstein to “give up” the cause after his last book on Gaza. That changed after October 7th, and while the Palestinians continue to pour out their blood to reveal the extent of Israeli depravity, world opinion has swung definitively against Israel.

Whether that leads to real and lasting change remains to be seen. In the meantime we continue to educate, whether “monetized” or not.

#EndTheOccupation