Is YouTube Censoring Gamers?!

Red Dead Redemption 2 is the biggest game of the year and probably the entire console generation. This means that a lot of gamers are looking for more content related to the game and they’re probably looking for some humor as well.

Enter Shirrako – a YouTuber with a healthy following and a seemingly endless stream of content – sometimes uploading 5-6 videos a day. I can barely pump out 1 a week.

His videos surround popular games and showcase either straight gameplay or just him doing stupid stuff in the game. Like feeding a feminist to an Alligator.

I’ll be honest, Shirrako wasn’t on my radar at all until I started seeing screenshots of the titles of his videos on /r/gamingcirclejerk – I kept scrolling mainly because it’s a video game and doesn’t really mean anything to me. There has been a war raging between gamers and SJW Feminists for 4 years at least – it’s not something that interests me because I don’t identify as either but yet here I am talking about it for the first time.

It wasn’t too long before a couple of gaming websites picked up on Shirrako’s videos. It’s not like they’re hard to find. One of his feminist killing videos went viral fetching over a million views. The new Rockstar video game features a number of characters and one that seems apt for the time period is a woman suffragette yelling “Let me vote” in one of the towns. Seeing as it’s Rockstar, you can do a lot of things that the developers probably didn’t intend for you to do. Like punch this lady in the face, hog tie her behind your horse and then let an Alligator eat her.

And those aren’t the only videos that Shirrako has made in Red Dead. There’s numerous videos that are titled with key SEO terms made specifically to get views. There’s one about walking through a suicide forest ( a reference to Jake Paul’s infamous video at the beginning of the year) there’s a video about a guy drowning in crap, punching Hitler in the face. The list goes on. There’s so many videos about Red Dead Redemption on this specific channel with crazy titles that it’s clear this guy doesn’t really hate feminists. OR DOES HE?!! Probably not judging by the statement given to Vice regarding his videos. Which by the way is titled in the same outrage inducing manner as Shirrako's videos.

"I know you're probably expecting some political answer but the truth is it was simply a funny moment from one of my streams which I've decided to upload as a separate video," they said. "Not sure if it was intentional by Rockstar Games but the NPC is made to be rather annoying, when you try to shop for clothing in the game, your dialogue with the shop keeper keeps being interrupted by her shouting, so I simply wanted to shop in peace, I'm sure that as a gamer you're familiar with these annoying NPC situations."

When you have a controversial video that makes the round on major media outlets and the front page of Reddit, you’re going to get some unwanted attention. Enough reports and the video gets flagged for review. The video in question was the video of Shirrako feeding the feminist to the alligator. This video was determined to not meet the community guidelines and Shirrako was given a community strike on his channel. Almost immediately after that notification, Shirrako was notified by YouTube that because of numerous strikes against his channel, the channel would be terminated along with all 8500 videos.

Eventually the decision was overturned after some massive outcry on Twitter. In between you had numerous outspoken YouTubers decry the decision and label them as anti-free speech.

But here’s the deal – YouTube isn’t anti Free Speech, they’re just idiots. YouTube has a content problem – there is so much content uploaded everyday to the site that it’s simply impossible to police all the content. They have remedied this by hiring thousands of live persons to review the content that gets reported from the system. This means that your video that gets reported is probably being reviewed by someone who has no context for your other videos and they probably only get paid $15 an hour to do it. Or worse, they get paid per video viewed.

This means that if a video gets reported multiple times and has the title – ANNOYING FEMINIST FED TO ALLIGATOR – it’s probably going to dinged before the reviewer even opens it up. Which is terrifying when you have a channel with over 500K subs.

YouTube needs to review and solidify their content policy to make it more fair. If you have over 100K subs you should have a more senior team to review the videos and make a better judgement call. YouTube has egg on their face and it’s clear that more people who believe they have been persecuted on the platform for their beliefs have a more solid leg to stand on. Even though it’s not the case in this scenario.