Last week, Alexander Hall reported YouTube posted a terms of service update of new policies to take effect on December 10, 2019. One of the new rules states that “YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable."
This has the potential to destroy viewpoints with which YouTube and its parent company Google disagree, namely conservative channels. Mashable speculated that “these terms can be seen as YouTube giving itself the ability to remove users and channels that disseminate hate speech or other violent rhetoric.”
The good news is that the TOS clause in question which has the potential to wipe out many conservative channels has been spotlighted by several websites and YouTubers, including Mark Dice.
Mark Dice explains why that clause could be toxic for conservative channels.
This week in censorship we learned that YouTube is updating their Terms Of Service next week and added a little clause that reads they may delete your account if it's no longer commercially viable....
It appears that this means if a channel is demonetized which we've seen happen to numerous sizable channels in the last few months or a significant portion of the videos are demonetized and you're costing YouTube bandwidth by having them host your videos they may just delete the accounts. Mashable reported, quote as written these broad terms give YouTube the power to delete a creators accounts if they upload or livestream video that, for example, doesn't pull in enough advertising revenue. YouTube then claimed that that's not what the new Terms of Service mean at all and we're just reading them wrong.
They didn't even issue a statement to the press about this or send a follow-up email to all of us YouTubers who got the original email about the Terms of Service updates. Every news article about this supposed clarification is pointing to a Tweet that they sent out, not even really publicly, it was a response to one Twitter user who was concerned about this and they claimed that we're just misunderstanding it.
Here is the Tweet that Dice was referring to:
Perhaps YouTube, instead of merely replying to a Tweet, could make the creators who made that site a success feel more at ease by issuing a clarification via a press release. Oh, and in the same press release, perhaps YouTube could also explain why they are now promoting mainstream media channels via suggested videos much more heavily than the YouTube creators channels who are, after all, the "You" in YouTube.
