Community Standards

I got a message from an actor who had featured in a number of my shorts and videos asking what happened to the youtube channel associated with it.  Almost all of the shorts and monologues were on it.  I checked and it was gone.  The channel itself had been up since 2009.  A couple of the shorts were older, the original from 2007 and a simpler one from 2008.  I hadn’t logged in to it for a long time, and had only used it to get the links for sharing the shorts wherever appropriate.  I checked the associated e-mail account and sure enough that same day I had received a notice that the account had been suspended for reports of “violating community standards.”  I followed the link to their form to post an appeal, and apparently got an automated acknowledgement of the appeal’s receipt with an “as soon as possible” reassurance of processing it.

No doubt that having more people sit at home during the Covid-19 lockdown has attracted more busybodies false flagging anything that doesn’t suit their own tastes ostensibly as volunteers helping youtube improve the site.  It gives the lie to the concept of community standards.  Is youtube a resource of a community?  Like Twitter, the comment sections can be a cesspool.  But ideally if it were a community that might mean that your neighbor two doors down could be watching content that is not to your taste and that should be okay.  The one gray area in this is that having not logged in to the account for a few years I did not get the alert and link to click “not intended for children” which has been a recent addition to youtube because they got fined for hosting a video that drew complaints from the usual busybodies.  If the channel is restored I will see to clicking that, although the problem would not exist if the DEFAULT were “not intended for children” so that in the rare case that something is meant to be kid-friendly the content creator posting it can designate it as such.

I’m still crossing my fingers at the time of this blog entry.  We will see.  Maybe faith will be restored in reason and comprehension.  Content creators should be protected from busybodies and also perhaps from our personal enemies and rivals.  We sometimes hear about self-styled pundits on youtube getting false flagged by each other.    When a channel is “reviewed” we, the users, content creators, or community, don’t know by whom and what that review entailed.  Was an individual or team playing back each of the sorts and monologues on my channel?  Because if they did, and they were all adults, they would have recognized that even though the channel centers around Porno the Clown (played by Jay Ould) and is called pornotheclownDOTcom it does not contain porn. They would see that it is all satirical and motivated by a sense of whimsical mischief that is becoming more and more rare in hyper-sensitive times.  The channel has been up for 11 years, even beyond 2013 when colleges began to takes seriously the quirks and the demands of the lunatic fringe and pander to them and when that began to seep into pop culture in general.  Dexter and Breaking Bad ended in 2013.  Robin Williams and Harold Ramis died in 2014, as did Bill Cosby’s public persona. So it becomes a different world every few years.

One person’s food is another person’s poison.  As I have said before, since we are likely not sharing the same screen or monitor I can enjoy Dave Chappelle’s latest video and you can enjoy RuPaul’s Drag Race and neither of us has to interfere with the other.  There is so much content out there it is almost impossible to catch up.  We all usually want to reinforce or validate our own views, even if we pay lip service to the importance of exposure to conflicting opinions to “sharpen the blade.”  You can agree with someone on most every issue and get unfriended (as recently happened to me) by someone you have been supportive to and stood up for….. and the transgression in my case was telling someone there is no reason to blame Bernie Sanders if the DNC chooses a mediocre nominee to support and Agent Orange gets a second term.  People have to vote FOR something more than AGAINST something to be engaged and committed.

My initial plan was that the shorts and monologues would continue and the channel would have been used to help increase awareness of the character Porno the Clown in anticipation of the feature length movie I had written and story boarded.  My impulse is to double down and still do it.  That may still happen.  But something has to be adjusted on the “community standards” end of things.  A cycle of content being created and unceremoniously deleted is unworkable.  It was bad enough during the Stephen Harper years of Canada that Canadian production companies got spooked by a pending bill that could see TV shows or movies denied a tax credit if the resulting project was deemed to not fit the community standards of the time.  Content can not be one size fits all.  Too many cooks do spoil the soup.     There is something to offend everybody.  Unless the reactionary trend snaps under its own weight even the most low budget and independent content will be suffocated.