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Is YouTube Anti-Cryptocurrency?
By Shane Addinall Dec 30, 2019 OpinionYouTube shocked the cryptocurrency industry by removing thousands of videos, only to later cite “internal errors”. Is this true or did they simply tip their hand? What will this mean for YouTube as the purge drives interest in crypto-friendly sites?While most of us were celebrating Christmas this year the cryptocurrency industry found itself dumbfounded by a content purge on Googles YouTube video platform. Within minutes hundreds of content creators found their accounts struck with multiple strikes, their videos demonetised and subsequently removed.
✓Crypto Community Outcry
As you can imagine the outcry from the community was swift and loud, with their plight gaining mainstream media attention with articles in the likes of Forbes going into great depths to raise awareness of the issue.
The ban was lifted within a few days citing an internal error and promising that the removed videos would be reinstated, and all strikes removed.
A YouTube spokesperson went on record saying:
"With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it's brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it."
While some accounts have had their strikes and bans lifted many have not yet seen any movement when it comes to having their video libraries reinstated. With some individual accounts claiming to have hundreds of videos the scope of this ban is not fully realised but could be in the tens of thousands of pieces of content.
✓Did YouTube Accidentally Tip Their Hand?
While YouTube is claiming internal errors caused the sitewide bans this has done nothing to calm the fears of the cryptocurrency content creators on the platform. After all, YouTube only recently began allowing crypto advertising and that was only due to US regulations clarifying that virtual coinage is neither securities nor scams but legitimate decentralised currencies.
There are some conspiracy theories doing the rounds that the error was in fact a misfire for a planned rush on the market sector brought about by Google’s partnership with US banking group Citigroup which will see them bring "smart checking" bank accounts to the marketplace via Google Pay.
This fact, in addition to the platform’s recent reliance on mainstream banking advertising spend to offset the result of the so called “Adpocalypse”, where massive companies like Nike pulled their ad spend from YouTube due to “unseemly” content pairings, has created an environment of distrust between themselves and their creators.
✓Purge Drives Interest In Crypto-Video Platforms
Whether these theories have any validity only time will tell, however a very real result of the crypto-purge has been the public consensus that content creators need to protect their voices and their income from future draconian YouTube decisions.
Changpend Zao, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, wants to take the fight for decentralised content to YouTube saying:
"It may be time the crypto community take a stab at its own blockchain-enabled censorship-resistant social media platform"
Many YouTube content creators are now actively disseminating their content across cryptocurrency friendly content platforms such as LBRY, Steem It, D.Tube and Dlive. Not only are these platforms open to their form of content, but they promote community-based monetisation using Bitcoin, Ethereum and others, making them immune to the need to satisfy advertisers.
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