In a massive blow to the first amendment auditing community, roughly 90% of YouTube’s first amendment auditing community, including Long Island Audits, Delete LawZ Clips and San Joaquin Valley Transparency, received notifications on Monday that their YouTube channels were being demonetized effective immediately due to violations of the YouTube content creator policy.
YouTube’s content creator policy essentially says that creators must follow YouTube’s community guidelines, terms of service and AdSense program policies. Those policies clearly state that channels cannot feature harmful or illegal behavior and also penalize creators for off-platform behavior.
In the world of first amendment auditing, auditors often film themselves being arrested. It is part of the supposed “test” of the first amendment. Especially in the beginning of first amendment auditing on YouTube.
The early days of the genre saw auditors provoking police officers as a test of their first amendment rights. Often auditors would negatively engage, insult and degrade officers to the point where they would provoke their own arrests.
In recent days only a handful of auditors actually practice this style of auditing, with that list including Regan Benson and Jose “Chille” DeCastro. A large majority of the rest of the auditing community moved on to provoking bystanders into negative or violent interactions which the auditor then ends with pepper spraying the other party.
In recent weeks, YouTubers Zachary “Liberty Troll” Kueker, Amagansett Press and John “First Amendment Protection Agency” Medaglia have all made headlines after pepper spraying incidents. None of the men were charged with crimes from the encounters as they were defending themselves from violence even if they verbally provoked their attackers.
Medaglia even going as far as to print up merchandise off of his latest encounter, where he knocked out his attacker with a punch from a hand wrapped around his can of pepper spray.
While technically “not illegal,” the violence promoted by these channels has brought negative attention to the community and YouTube has been left with a decision on what it is going to promote on its channels.
Some of the channels that were demonetized on Monday received notifications that their monetization was suspended for 90 days and after the 90-day period they could reapply for monetization.
All of the channels received instructions that they could file an appeal of the decision, though those who have gone through previous appeals have stated that the process itself could take up to 90 days to receive a decision.
YouTuber San Joaquin Valley Transparency was the first auditor to go live and address his demonetization, followed soon after by Bay Area Transparency. Bay Area Transparency vowed to fight his demonetization and asked for his community to help support his family during the process.
San Joaquin took a different approach, stating that he barely made any money off of YouTube and has an outside website. He floated the idea of buying content from other creators with limited exclusivity rights as an alternative to YouTube.
He also questioned the auditing community and those auditors who were going to stop creating content based on losing their revenue stream. The auditor made it clear that auditing was more than about YouTube revenue and that he would continue to take part in audits despite his losses.
As of press time larger auditing channels belonging to such luminaries in the auditing world as SeanPaul “Long Island Audits” Reyes and Jose “Chille” DeCastro have yet to address their demonetization.
We will continue to provide updates as we receive them.
This is a breaking news story.
