If you care at ALL about censorship, privacy online, or the things happening to YouTube as well as all the other shit going on right now, please please read this post.
Been a while since I posted something original.
So, if you somehow haven't heard about it, YouTube, as of Wednesday, August 13, 2025 (the day this will be posted), is rolling out their new Identification system. Essentially, YouTube will now use AI to evaluate your age based on your searches and what you watch on the platform, regardless of what you inputted as your account age yourself. If YouTube does flag your account as a child, you will lose certain features, and some other changes will be made. If the IA were to make a mistake and wrongfully flag someone who is over 18, the ONLY way to rebuke the loss of features is to hand over your GOVERNMENT ID, like a driver's license, or some other form of identification. YouTube will also keep this info for somewhere between two months and two YEARS in their databases.
(btw this is obviously a simplified version just covering the just of things. If you want more info, I suggest going onto the scandalous site and checking out the channel Deep Humor. He has a lot of content about the situation and what is going to happen.)
Additionally, while this has been going on, another discussion about censorship in video games has been brought up by an Australian feminist group named Collective Shout. This group reached out to payment processor companies like Visa and MasterCard, which then pressured video game companies into removing/censoring many NSFW games. Some of the most influencial of websites that got pressured into changing things were Steam and Itch.io. Steam updated their development policies to prohibit "content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam's payment processors, and related card networks, and banks, or internet provides. In particular, certain kinds of adult-only content". This caused a SHITTON of games to be cut from the Steam library. Itch.io released a statement saying that they have "deindexed all adult NSFW content from our browse and search pages". More than 20000 games were taken down from Itch.io that day.
(I'm mostly going to be focusing on the YouTube policy in this post, but feel free to expand on this or other things I talk about in the comments or in rbs.)
ADDITIONALLY, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the US have all been pushing in multiple different ways for more identification to be necessary on the internet. In particular, Australia has banned social media apps for anyone under 16 years old, and the UK tried to CENSOR WIKIPEDIA.
What do these have in common?
They're all happening recently
They are all trying to censor what we see online
They all use the same excuse of "protecting the kids"
And they are ALL BULLSHIT.
This entire censorship thing has been stupid from start to finish. Australia, the UK and the US all creating absurd and privacy destroying laws to try and get your personal data, then saying "it's for the kids" is bullshit. What is the bad on Wikipedia that it needs censoring??? And if you think Australia's social media stunt is a good thing, porn sites DO NOT NEED TO CHECK FOR IDENTIFICATION AS MUCH AS SOCIAL MEDIA DOES IN THAT COUNTRY. IT IS LEGAL FOR A CHILD UNDER 16 TO FREQUENT PORNHUB, BUT THEY CAN'T TOUCH FACEBOOK. PROTECT THE KIDS MY ASS.
The censorship of NSFW games on Steam and Itch.io are bullshit too. I'm with the gooners on this one. You can't just take down something like that because you view it as "icky" or "weird", even if it is pornographic. Plus, there is no way to remove THAT MUCH CONTENT without having some innocent people caught in the cross hairs. E (yes, that is her actual YouTube account name) made a great video one specifically how LGBT people have been heavily affected by this, even if they weren't the target. Here's the video in question:
(Note that this video mainly talks about the video game censorship and how that could effect a lot of people in the LGBTQIA+ community, and while that is also a problem, it is not the subject of this post.)
But what I'm most concerned about is the new YouTube bullshit. It is by FAR the most disgusting. This is mostly because it's entirely made to get your personal data. There is NO person that truly believes they're here just to protect the kids. It's not on YouTube to do such a thing. They have already done all they need to for this age group in making YouTube Kids, an app specifically for younger audiences. Past that, it is entirely on the parents to monitor what their kids are seeing online. So why exactly is YouTube doing this then? It's simple. They want your ID.
Even if you do not believe that YouTube is doing this to get your personal data, there are still MANY glaring issues here. For example, what if they have a security breach? It's not farfetched, even if YouTube is a big company. And the sheer amount of people who would be affected would be most likely greater than any data leak we've ever seen before it. And plus, why keep our data for up to TWO YEARS?????
(If you want more info on all of this specifically, you should check out the channels Deep Humor, CerosTV, and Louis Rossmann. They all have a plethora of amazing videos about this subject, and I'm sure you can get all the info you'll need from them.)
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Contact:
[email protected] - Louis reads this - UNLESS YOU COPY & PASTE FROM CHATGPT, IN WHICH CASE I DELETE. I TALK TO VIEWERS, N
Which brings me to the main reason I'm writing this post. How can we fight back? How can we stop YouTube from taking our personal data? Well, I have a list of things, mostly small and easy to do, that we as a community HAVE to start doing. You don't have to do everything here, but at least doing some of these could go a long way.
Clippy was the old Microsoft assistant, and it was a little paper clip that was TERRIBLE at its job. But you know what Clippy didn't do? It didn't steal your personal data. It didn't sell you out to advertisers. It didn't do ANYTHING to actively harm you. Clippy is a symbol that we are not just sitting and taking this anymore. That we are going to fight back. And what are they going to do? Ban Clippy pfps? That's going to make them look even more stupid! This is the easiest way to fight against the censorship going on right now. Here's a link to the video by Louis Rossmann that started this movement btw
So this one is less about fighting against the censorship itself and more about protecting your own personal data, but it's important nonetheless. Remember that YouTube is using AI to evaluate what your age is. So you can potentially game the AI into saying you're an adult no matter what by searching up and watching things like the news or back problem videos, or something of the sort that would be known as content adults would watch.
Remember what I said about the group Collective Shout, who reached out to payment processors because they wanted change in the video game industry? It seems insane, but we can do that too. There are ways to reach out to advertisers and ask them to stop advertising to YouTube. YouTube may not listen to us, but they will listen to the companies giving them money. And obviously one call to one place isn't going to do shit, but if enough people do it to enough companies, they will eventually start to listen.
This one is easier said than done, but there are other platforms you can watch shit on. TikTok, Twitch, Rumble, all of these are options, and while probably none will be able to replace YouTube, any views you give to those places is one you didn't give to YouTube. This is yet another one of these that only works if we ALL do it. It might not hurt YouTube too much, but if it's enough to be noticeable, that's a win.
5. Do NOT shut up about this
Do NOT by ANY MEANS stop talking about this. This is by FAR the most important part of this post. We can't let YouTube, or Collective Shout, or thw fucking government, or anything else forget that we are angry about this, and we ourselves should not forget that we SHOULD BE angry. Keep making your own posts. Make this day annual Fuck Censorship Day. No matter what, we need to keep talking.
Im not exactly a very prevalent force on the internet, in fact here on this blog is just about the only place I actually talk about my own shit. So if you are reading this, share it. Reblog. Like. Tag your friends. Feel free to post this on Reddit, or Twitter (never calling it X), or any other place you think this should be said. Make sure everyone knows about the absolute bullshit that this is.
We are being silenced. So stop being silent.
