Daily Wire v. YouTube

Yesterday afternoon the head of The Daily Wire updated everyone on Twitter about his company’s fight with YouTube. This goes to why CNAV’s video channel, Declarations of Truth, suspended all YouTube uploads and started licensing exclusively with Rumble. How YouTube has treated Declarations of Truth lately is irrelevant here – that falls under the category of a “shadow ban.” Their treatment of Daily Wire is far more explicit and serves as a warning to every other conservative content creator. If this hasn’t yet happened to them, it will – for it continues the activity of YouTube and Google as State actors.

What is The Daily Wire?

Ben Shapiro founded The Daily Wire (official site) in 2015. They have never pretended to be anything other than conservative. So what you see, is what you get. It has a large stable of podcasters, and its own motion-picture production company. Perhaps its most famous project is Terror on the Prairie, starring Gina Carano – the actress who famously lost her acting gig with Lucasfilm, now a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.

More recently, several of their top talents have boldly highlighted the fundamental wrongness of the transgender movement. This includes Matt Walsh’s new documentary, What is a Woman, the Twitter premiere of which occasioned a shakeup at Twitter’s Trust and Safety Team. The problem: YouTube doesn’t have the scruples Elon Musk has about freedom of speech. Lately they have singled out The Daily Wire for special treatment of the wrong kind. Twitter even let Matt Walsh follow up his movie with a thread exposing the transgender “scam.” In contrast, YouTube has systematically “struck” Matt Walsh’s account, and those of Jordan Peterson and others. That’s why Peterson announced his intention to upload exclusively to Rumble from now on.

Yesterday Jeremy Boreing, co-CEO of The Daily Wire (with Ben Shapiro), decided to give everyone a full update.

The thread

Here is Jeremy Boering’s fourteen-tweet thread, as the anchor tweet, the odd numbers, and the trailing tweet.

Daniel Chaitin, member of Daily Wire staff, posted this article highlighting the thread and other instances of censorship.

A few definitions of terms are in order. Limited monetization, on YouTube, means that YouTube will offer the video only to advertisers who have opted in to advertise on videos so marked. A video with this limitation will also get its share of revenues from views on YouTube Premium. (YouTube Premium is YouTube’s ads-free subscription.)

Reaction to this thread has been almost entirely positive. One user chose to quote-tweet yet another thread on FBI collusion with Ukraine’s intelligence agency.

CNAV covered that before, when Aaron Maté revealed how he ran afoul of that censorship campaign.

Alex Stein shared the strike he got for pointing out that the transgender movement specifically targets autistic children.

Mr. Boreing received many suggestions – like adding a social media company to his already large stable of subsidiaries. But as another user quickly pointed out, that might earn a quicker ban from smartphone app stores. So maybe this course of action would be appropriate:

But by far the most common suggestion anyone made was to shift uploads to Rumble.

This user suggested that YouTube would have censored those who second-guessed the use and abuse of tobacco.

Analysis

As others have pointed out, if YouTube continues to behave in this fashion, they will start losing viewership. The strictly non-political viewership might remain for awhile, but eventually that, too, will suffer. That might seem a remote prospect today, since YouTube still has the lion’s market share. But Rumble, the second largest platform, continues to improve – and get attention as the refuge platform for the right.

YouTube has the longest, most complex “Community Guidelines” of all video platforms. They have discontinued two “misinformation” policies – on masks and on suggestions that anyone stole a Presidential election or elections. But as Mr. Boreing points out, that will come too late. (Declarations of Truth already is on warning for its review of Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary, 2000 Mules.) In sharp contrast Rumble has one of the simplest Terms of Service of all platforms. Perhaps only Gab has a simpler.

By far the most important insight in the thread is the ownership of Alphabet, Inc., the ultimate parent company of YouTube, by Blackrock and Vanguard. Those two holding companies have abandoned investing for profit and have formed an unholy alliance to promote evil. CNAV urges everyone invested in the stock market to divest from those firms and all their financial products and portfolios.

The Parallel Economy will continue to grow, and voices like The Daily Wire will be one reason.