Comment by phendrenad2

A non-comprehensive list of things youtube tells you to self censor or you will be financially punished, or punishes you for showing or telling despite not being listed in their community guidelines in any way

Swears (recently backed down somewhat on this)

Anything to do with guns at all, whether you are right wing or vocally and loudly left wing.

Mummmifying a chicken on a science channel gets you demonitized.

Chemistry that results in an explosion.

Fucking any footage of any war ever so no WW2 history videos, no videos educating you about previous genocides or war crimes or crimes against humanity, you can't show pictures of the holocaust or Armenian genocide no matter how educational your content is.

A highlight reel compiled exclusively from clips pulled from your previous videos that were not demonitized will get demonitized, and when you reach out to your dedicated account manager because you are that big, they say "that shouldn't have happened" and promise you to fix it and that it will never happen again, which you take to hear, and then you produce a new highlight reel the next year following the same procedure it again gets demonitized so you reach out to your account manager again and they apologize profusely and say they will fix it and then every single video on your channel gets demonitized and your account is suddenly in peril for doing something that your account manager told you to do.

You are a channel that shows pictures of planes and documents and talks about the development of these aircraft. One day your channel is suddenly scheduled for deletion because you are a "content mill". This is an utterly baseless accusation that would take five minutes of watching your content to dispel, but you still are left waiting until T-1 for an actual human to look and turn off the "Purge you" schedule.

It's just absurd. Sure, the racists are pissed they can't put hate content on youtube, but lets not pretend they should be the only ones. "Forgotten Weapons" is just a gun centric antiques roadshow but "selling guns" is explicitly against policy, and all the things with guns that aren't against policy "weirdly" also get demonitized all the time.

A reminder that "demonitization" on youtube is also what gets your video not recommended to anyone to watch, including your literal subscribers (yes even if you clicked the fucking bell)

Note that Youtube provides an entire set of tooling and functionality to automatically A/B test thumbnails and titles, yet claims in their community guidelines that you should not use "A thumbnail that misleads viewers to think they’re about to view something that’s not in the video" so they just DGAF