In this video, the speaker addresses Pedro’s earlier remarks about YouTube’s use of mechanical processes to police language. While acknowledging respect for Pedro, the speaker disagrees, arguing that YouTube’s moderation is driven primarily by advertiser pressure to make content television‑friendly rather than a genuine pursuit of civility. He references the classic “seven words you can’t say on television” as a shorthand for the advertiser‑driven blacklist. The speaker situates this within a broader historical pattern of censorship across media—books, music, and print—showing that each new medium faces similar moral panic and control by economically motivated forces. He critiques YouTube’s reliance on algorithms that flag profanity without contextual nuance, describing the approach as disingenuous and lacking responsibility. The discussion also touches on cultural differences in the perception of profanity, noting that regional attitudes affect how language is interpreted. Finally, he explains how algorithmic demotion suppresses videos, undermining the platform’s claim that viewers drive rankings, and frames this as a negative step rooted in advertising and mass‑audience considerations rather than a true effort to foster civility.
Chapters
This video is a response to Pedro's video about YouTube and language. Pedro, you know that I have great regard for you and great respect for your perspective. I, in this case, respectfully disagree with your assessment of YouTube's judgment to use mechanical processes and machines to make decisions about language being a good thing. Um, here's why. You believe that what YouTube is doing is something to improve the civility of their environment. I don't think so. I think what YouTube is doing is responding to pressure from their advertisers to make their partner content more television-friendly. You know, the 7 words that you can't say on television that George Carlin made so famous in that bit of his are the words that Advertisers don't want to have on any material that is associated with their products. I understand that. They're living in the past, and they think that language in itself is the determining factor of whether or not something is acceptable or not acceptable. Language is not the determining factor of whether something is accessible or not, acceptable or not acceptable. Every single medium since the beginning of time has gone through this pro— this This process of shock when people use the language that we use in our day-to-day lives, when we use that language in this new medium. Books— there's still people who want to censor books. Sarah Palin wanted books taken out of libraries because they portrayed— I'm sorry, I shouldn't use Sarah Palin, but she pops into mind because she was a popular example of someone who was still trying to censor print. We have people who want to censor. We had in the— we've, we've seen in music, the lyrics of music. We still have, uh, controversy over whether musical lyrics should be censored. Every time a new form of expression comes into play and gets put into the hands of people— see, as long as the forms of expression are kept in the hands of, um, a controlling force which has strong economic motivation to limit the kinds of content that is expressed through that medium. As long as that happens, then things are fine. It's when it gets out of control that it becomes a problem, because then real people use it and real people say things. And do things. And then decisions have to be made, and decisions are messy because decisions can be questioned. You know, if I make a decision, if we make a decision here on Vloggerheads like we do— this content is okay, this content isn't okay— well, people can look at that and say, well, why was this okay and that not okay? And What we say is because we decided that it was okay or not okay. And as many people have pointed out in regards to YouTube, it's their site, they can decide whatever they want about material. But they're not really deciding. They're saying, "We're gonna use an algorithm to decide." Nobody's gonna say to you, "Well, you know, if you say the word— if you read a passage out of, uh, James Joyce, um, and you use the word fuck, or you read D.H. Lawrence aloud in one of your videos from Lady Chatterley's Lover, and you describe a section, and you are doing some kind of a critique or a commentary on that section, and you use the words that D.H. Lawrence used in Lady Chatterley's Lover in your video, uh, we're sorry, but that's not acceptable. They're not saying that. They're saying 'Well, all we're doing is just running an analysis, and if the words appear, the words appear. What can we do? It's all we're doing is just, you know, the patterns.' It's disingenuous is what it is. It's disingenuous. It's not taking the kind of responsibility that, you know, they should take for making decisions about things. And it's I, you know, I find it, I find it to be one of those things that, that is— it also has a lot of, a lot of politics involved in it. Politics because certain cultural, uh, I grew up in a place where we were freer with language, with those 7 words, than people from other parts of the country and other parts of the world were. So if we called somebody a motherfucker, we didn't always mean it in ways that were perceived by other people as meaning something. We knew what we meant, but they didn't necessarily know what we meant. And so now I can't say things on YouTube— not that I care— but I can't say things on YouTube and not have my video kind of put under some kind of veil that says, well, you know, People might like this video, but the algorithm says we can't show people that other people like this video. We're going to demote it from our most viewed list, which remember, you know, the only human judgment that gets made on YouTube is the judgment around featuring, right? The viewers are the ones who drive the most viewed, but now they're saying no, no, no, the viewers can't really even drive that. We have to demote your video from the most viewed. Why? Well, because it might have corporate products attached to it that are not going to be accepted, that are going to be made uncomfortable by the fact that I said the word motherfucker. So I'm not enthralled with their motivation here to create a YouTube for all, as they put it in their blog. Their motivation is to hide, and their motivation is to create televisable-friendly material that advertisers will, will like. If they were really interested in creating civility, they had a lot of ways to create civility. If they really cared, Pedro, about whether or not people were offending one another, they've got— they would have done a lot of things about that in the past. This is not a positive step. This is a negative step, and it's in keeping, I think, with the kind of decision-making that we've seen at YouTube for a long time, and it's decision-making driven by mass audience and advertising. So that's my perspective on all this. And, you know, you'll continue to be able to use language on Vloggerheads that you believe effectively expresses your ideas. If that language goes beyond what we consider to be acceptable, we'll take responsibility for saying it's not okay.
