0:00:00
Unknown_03:
YouTube has put into place discriminatory new actions to disable every single comment section on all of our videos. And I say that word discriminatory knowing the implications of it, and I mean it 100%.
Unknown_04: On February 17th, 2019, a fat dipshit by the name Matt's What It Is created a now infamous video called YouTube is facilitating the sexual exploitation of children and it's being monetized. This video went viral, caught the attention of mainstream media and YouTube itself, and instituted swift change across the platform regarding the monetization of videos featuring children. Now I know what you're thinking. You immediately have assumed that YouTube has fucked this up and somehow hurt children in the process because that's what YouTube does and that's how Google does. Well, here's how.
0:00:39
Unknown_03:
They're doing it under the guise, under the mask of protecting children from predators. But they're only selecting certain channels.
Unknown_02: At random, it seems like. It is at random. And I don't want to push it, but it seems like channels that are larger or that have corporate or advertisers behind them, that they're not being impacted at all, even if their content is more subjective to the type of predation that they're trying to combat.
Unknown_03: And if you know our channel, you know that all of the comments are positive.
0:01:20
Unknown_04:
Yes indeed, Google is of course going after the channels that aren't monetized and don't make it money. That's not unusual, that's basically YouTube's entire MO. What's especially funny about this is what they do. You're probably wondering what these two upstanding young people are doing with their time that makes them claim that their YouTube comment section is somehow nice. The answer is they run a charity for disabled people to talk about their disabilities, and not just disabled people, but half the time disabled children. Special Books by Special Kids is a 501c3 registered charity making video content about heavily disabled people and children. It was founded by a special education teacher with the intent of making a book about the struggles of people living with disability, but because it had no interest from mainstream publishers, he decided to just make YouTube videos instead. It was so successful they now have more than 1 million subscribers willing to listen to disabled people talk about their lives. How could this possibly go wrong?
0:01:59
Unknown_01:
For the past four years, we've been doing everything we can to help give a voice to people.
Unknown_03: To give them a platform. They have a voice, but we give them the platform to use that voice. And we've interviewed countless people with disabilities and conditions with two purposes. The first purpose is to get their voice out there, give them that platform so they can communicate with the world.
0:02:47
Unknown_03:
And the second purpose is to let the world communicate with them. To show the people who we meet that there is good in the world.
Unknown_02: And that they are valued and that they are accepted.
Unknown_03: That so many people understand them and love them and want them to be included. And I just feel like YouTube just took that from us. They ripped it from us and they will not even explain why they did it.
Unknown_04: And in case you're wondering just how devastating this loss is to them, it's not about just losing comments. Because remember, they're a charity. They don't make money off these videos. It's easy to say that their crying is fake because they lost some source of revenue, but they didn't. It's a 501c3. It would be illegal for them to make money off of what they're doing. They have a different reason for why this might be so hard on them.
0:03:21
Unknown_03:
And I was editing a video I intended to share tomorrow of a little girl who's nine years old and she's a stage four cancer survivor who's still battling it and she did some... Anyway, she...
Unknown_02: Just think of what good, the kindness, the love and empathy that she could feel through the comments.
0:03:55
Unknown_02:
The positivity we've shown before she shared in the video that she couldn't find any friends at school So she eats lunch every day with the principal and when she said that I was devastated But I was also looking forward to our community rallying around her to showing her love to showing her support And I feel like that's taken from her.
Unknown_03: I feel like that was just robbed from her and
Unknown_04: I have no doubt in my mind that these nice people will get their comments back and things will proceed as they were before this happened. However, I do want to leave a warning to everybody asking for censorship. This idiot made a video trying to bring to the forefront of consciousness a pedophile ring, acting as a would-be law enforcement agency. He attacked YouTube's advertisers to try and get himself attention and money for what he was doing. Instead of helping anyone, he has instead deprived surviving family members of dead children of their own obituary comments left on YouTube videos.
0:04:47
Unknown_02:
the impact of what we do, there is so much lost when you look at comments not being there, at that community.
Unknown_03: There are videos of people who passed away and their parents read the comments and it's a way of keeping their kid alive and now they're gone. The parents can never look at the comments again. Kane's comments are gone and his mom often told me that she...
Unknown_04: And maybe I'm just a complete psychopath, but I find a level of humor in this. Because it's not even been six months since this shit was posted by YouTube itself, and this is what's happening.
0:05:34
Unknown_00:
I want to give a moment to everyone who supported me when I got sick. All of the comments and messages I got made me feel like I wasn't alone.
Unknown_01: We're forgetting something.
Unknown_01: I think we should read the comments.
Unknown_01: Yeah, I have a feeling this is about to get a little bit crazy. Let's give the people what they want.
Unknown_04: And if you find yourself agreeing with the fact that maybe children shouldn't be featured in YouTube videos at all, well... They didn't even address that.
0:06:15
Unknown_03:
They didn't address the fact that we said half of our videos have no minors, half of our videos are interviewing adults, and even those comments are disabled. And what's truly ironic is now, in this age of paranoia where YouTube is so afraid of looking bad to its own advertisers, they're a suspect of even these people.
Unknown_02: I mentioned, you know, that some channels will get to keep their comments as sort of a sub-team that works really in tandem with YouTube to help moderate their comments. We asked
Unknown_02: Why were we not considered for this? Wouldn't address it other than to say that we were high risk. We're high risk. It's not a conversation point. There's not a conversation. It's so frustrating to know that you can just create something so beautiful, so positive, that's just a force.
0:06:54
Unknown_03:
A billion people across social media have seen our videos, and these platforms can just turn it off.
Unknown_04: And it's not a joke what they do. You know, their videos, there are hundreds of their videos, and they have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of views each letting people who are seriously physically disabled talk about their disabilities. And some of their videos are hard to watch because the people are so disabled. And that's the whole point, is to expose something that people don't want to look at to a broader audience so that they're more comfortable with it. They don't want to see them as sideshow freaks because they look different. And I know that's rich coming from me, but I can't help but respect something like that. At the end of this, I'm left with a situation where I can't decide what's scarier. A future where artificial intelligence is making sweeping decisions in clumsy and noticeable ways that hurt real organizations like this that do real good. Or a future where AI is so good at what it does, nobody even notices. Because while I was digging through this, and while I was putting this together, and while I was looking for a good clip of a video that they do to include, I happened to discover this. And considering that this was posted on February 14th, and their comments were disabled on February 23rd, this might have more to do with it than YouTube would like to admit.
0:08:03
Unknown_03:
If you had to introduce yourself to the world, what would you say? I would say, I am Chris Fisher, I'm an abortion survivor. Do you want your mom to feel any guilt?
Unknown_05: Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. I don't want her to feel guilty. I want her to know that it's okay. And I think she's starting to feel that. No, I wouldn't want to deal with anyone.
0:08:44
Unknown_05:
I've accepted the things she does, and she accepts the things I do, and we just love each other. The amazing thing is that she forgave me.
Unknown_04: Now far be it from me to promote any conspiracy theories, but do any of you really have a shred of doubt in your mind that YouTube would hurt charitable organizations promoting disabled children if it were a way of getting offensive Christian values that piss off their advertisers off their platform? Come on. Come on, be real. I can't imagine YouTube doing anything unless it was specifically for that. And at the heart of all this controversy and all this bullshit, there's real people getting fucked over because of it. Welcome to the start of the technocratic AI era, where everything is done not by committee, but by algorithm. And the algorithm says that anti-abortion people make advertisers not want to advertise on their platform.
0:09:17
Unknown_03:
You okay? Dad.