The Act Man & YouTube TOS

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I typically stray far from YouTube drama, as any professional should because its endless and often times villainizing and very polarizing with fan boys being worse than clan kids but I think that this should be reviewed because its reinforcing the precedent of privilege in influencers and relational to where most platforms are now in todays socioeconomic moderating climate. Even after posting this I expect it to be an unpopular opinion because there are different ways of looking at this. 

I first believe that if you have a following, it doesn't matter if you are 100k, 500k or 1m and higher you should abide by the same rules and be enforced all the same. In character as "The Act Man" he made multiple satirical tweets without understanding the depth of conversation in what he said, as things are at face value its fair that threatening and pursuing malicious activity especially to hardworking engineers and employees of YouTube is grounds for de-platforming. 

To preface, 

A back and forth battle between The Act Man and Quantum TV has now led to The Act Man being demonetized from YouTube entirely – all of which stemmed from a YouTube video back in April, in which The Act Man used sections of Quantum TV’s Elden Ring video.

In response, Quantum TV threatened to issue a copyright infringement notice, despite The Act Man claiming the video was fair use. Ultimately, the copyright notice was rejected by YouTube.

However, Act Man pursued the termination of Quantum’s channel, under the grounds that he abused and issued a false copyright strike – which can result in a channel being shut down, according to the platform’s own rules.

One thing leads to another and...

 

Its clear YouTube like any corporation acted on face value of evidence tweeted/posted on the internet against its interest. It is the responsibility of a company to insure its employees are safe working there. For some reason this is completely ignored in most conversations regarding this topic but its only the most recent action and response from YouTube.

What we've seen is that YouTube's moderation isn't going to go in depth to drama, especially allegations without validated proof. In this same observation, like 343 Industries and Microsoft actions over Discord and other services outside of the platform are considered isolated or invalid to them. They will only act on things as they see fit and in their peripheral view and scope of the company or 3rd party investigation (that I can imagine isn't something they are interested in doing). We can deduct that YouTube, despite complaints from a partner level channel, who is basically an contractor/employee at this level does not trust him, or even the elected internal account manager whose known as a partner to the channel.

We see this every day on Halo of people accusing one another of doxxing, cheating, ddosing and more and the solutions the community has been brought up before but never acknowledged. Where cheating is simply a kernel level anti-cheat (to which industry standard is really the base height in a jump rope for hackers to jump over) drama, and other events such as doxxing or being a terrible person is harder to deduce. For most just one accusation can do so much damage, I've experienced this personally, I mean people hate me that I don't even know for things that have never happened. In a digital age and where Photoshop is taught in schools very early for others to fabricate evidence its become even harder for moderators to trust others. 

343 Industries created an entire job position and ticket response team for Halo support. Closing and isolating events to just Halo, so that whenever there is an event outside of Halo and outside of their scope they urge you follow up with that platform. Snickerdoodle sharing herself that events like CINC W Bane or Frightens #0666 grooming, predating and more need to be reported through Discord. 

Now to Act Man, there is a strong belief that there was an overenforcement unfairly towards him and not Quantum TV. While anyone can agree that's probably true it is an subjective topic altogether. I for one think that the market is so saturated that competition should be encouraged and he should have known better not to potentially lose his audience over small channel disagreements away from his gaming-centric channel. It really sucks though we've started seeing this through out the industry. 343 Industries has banned people from HaloWaypoint, Halo's Discord, Subreddit even blocking others on Twitter for opposing thoughts and even less. Repeatedly from times where the El Dewrito mod was DMCA'd to even now if you profess negatively an opinion on the Halo TV show, where do you think it'll end?