OP;ED - Youtube's Demonetization Censorship or Not [3/Sep/16]

Attempting to put some thoughts down about the whole situation. There were several edits of the script so it may appear to be winding down in the middle, it doesn't. So hold on till the end but the TL;DR of the situation is:

Is it an attack of free speech? No.
Is it censorship? Probably not.
Is our definition of censorship suitably encompassing for a post-internet age? Probably not.
Is there such a thing as "not advertiser friendly"? I don't think so, check the deep dark corners of the internet, porn/gore/piracy sites etc still have ads.
Could Youtube do better to make their ToCs clearer and work to better connect users with suitable advertisers? Almost certainly.

Currently I think the best course of action is a head count of whom this is happening to and on what and how much content. After a head count to see who this is effecting we may be able to ascertain if a pattern exists and then we could start to build a case for pseudo or soft-censorship via disincentives should such a pattern be present. But that wouldn't be true censorship, so I think we may also have to consider that our current understanding of what censorship is may not be suitable for a post-internet age. Waiting for more information to understand exactly what has happened is better than jumping the gun to cry censorship when this could just be a mistake of automation.

I think that's about it.

H8rs gon h8

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