YouTube Continues to Crackdown on Cryptocurrency Channels

YouTube has had a rocky relationship with cryptocurrency-related channels and news reports for a long time. Far from the “upload what you will” site we all grew current day YouTube, thanks to their very corporate parent company Google, has become known for banning content creators across a wide spectrum of verticals for “terms of service” infringements.

 YouTube Is Now Less Sunny

Popular cryptocurrency streamer, Sunny Decree, had his live stream terminated without warning. The reason given was that the stream violated their amorphous “harmful and dangerous policy”, however, no details were provided as to what Google considered harmful.

Sunny had received a warning from Google which stated a specific but confusing line he was not to cross– that of recording video content in both English and German. Once again Sunny, who is based in Switzerland, was not told why he could not create content in both languages.

As of the time of writing this Sunny’s channel is still live and his past videos can be viewed but he must wait out his 2-week ban before being able to post new content or live stream again.

 The Grand Google Conspiracy

Conspiracy theories abound that YouTube is fabricating reasons to shut down cryptocurrency related content, under orders from Google, to protect fiat currencies and their relationship with various government bodies.

The fact that YouTube has shut down several live streams and, in some cases, full channels, dealing with virtual currency news and trading does not help their case. One example of this was in May 2020 when Cointelegraph had their Bitcoin Halving livestream shut down mid-stream with no explanation or apology.

This is also not a new development, in 2019 YouTube purged thousands of cryptocurrency education videos from their platform. The outcry from content creators and viewers was instant and overwhelming, leading to YouTube admitting that they made “the wrong call”.

 Possible Algorithm Problem?

There is a segment of the cryptocurrency community which believes that there is less malice involved in these shutdowns than most are willing to consider.

A report from earlier this year noted that users upload more than 500 hours of new video content to YouTube every minute. To manage that staggering amount of content they have had to resort to algorithms and given the numerous complaints from across the site’s user base these bots are far from perfect.

When you combine the ongoing scourge of actual Bitcoin scams being run on YouTube, and most social media sites, and the implementation of imperfect bots there is a high likelihood of good actors in the space being lumped in with the bad.

The real question facing the future of cryptocurrency video content is if YouTube considers it a viable enough market segment to invest the resources necessary to educate the algorithm, or if the reward outweighs the risk and simply let the channels continue to be taken down.