That appears to be the case, and a recent agreement between Google and Disney may be the cause.
The Star Wars fan channel “Star Wars Theory,” which boasts over three million subscribers, revealed on Monday that they demonetized a recent video they posted about the upcoming Disney+ Star Wars series “The Acolyte”. The video showed the outcry from the Star Wars community against “The Acolyte,” emphasizing how strongly the fan base had come together to oppose it.
The presenter and owner of the channel, Niatoos Dadbeh, wrote on social media, “The censorship has begun,” along with a screenshot of a letter from YouTube informing him that his video had been removed from user suggestions and demonetized.
Surprisingly, Jeremy Hambly of “The Quartering” learned that his film about “The Acolyte” had also lost its revenue.
Specifically, watching Dadbeh’s video reveals nothing that violates YouTube’s terms of service. However, YouTube informed Dadbeh that the video was “unsuitable for all sponsors” because it contained a single, little swear word that originated from a post on X. Dadbeh observed that you needed to use a magnifying glass to see it, and he went on to say that there is a lot of information available that has profanity in the title itself and is still fairly easily searchable.
In other words, the individual conducting the manual review had to search far and wide for anything that might have gone against the TOS before deciding to include the smallest swear word in the thumbnail, while other content that uses the same term gets away with it.
It seems extremely deliberate, as though YouTube is looking for any justification to conceal criticism of “The Acolyte.”
Although there isn’t any tangible proof that YouTube is attempting to accomplish this, there is one item that could account for the platform’s behavior.
Disney and Google established a cooperation in March to expand Google’s ad platform, according to Search Engine Land. Google would assist in simplifying the process for companies to have their advertisements appear on Disney’s streaming services, which include Hulu and Disney+. Google, not Disney, owns YouTube, but Google also oversees Disney’s ad inventory on a number of other sites, which might very well include YouTube. Given their cooperation, anything unflattering about Disney (such as “The Acolyte”) may be subject to far tougher moderation.
It’s possible that Google is filtering criticism of their dreadful show on behalf of Disney, or possibly at their request, given how unsettling it would be if your business partner was entertaining the most vocal critics without any moderation. If you paid the individuals who were making the criticisms with ad content—the main focus of Disney and Google’s partnership—it would appear even worse.
Again, I have no strong evidence to support this, but it could help explain why YouTube is targeting criticism of Disney videos more severely than other content. The cost of your free speech is too high.
If this is indeed the case, then nobody would be shocked. Even when a video doesn’t violate the TOS, YouTube frequently censors it for a variety of reasons. YouTube similarly censored films critical of Hillary Clinton, including one by a pro-Clinton author that exposed a close relationship between Clinton and Google.
The notion of YouTube blocking someone who criticizes one of their partners is not implausible.
Author: Steven Sinclaire
There all in each others pocket, so knowing who did what would be kind of hard. But people did not like “The Acolyte” Cause of the witches being Gay. Anyway i am know fan of them any of these Star wars so i will let it be.