The Chinese Communist Party
Doesn’t want you to watch this video
But are they controlling YouTube?
Welcome to China Uncensored. I’m Chris Chappell.
The Chinese Communist Party has been very successful at censoring Americans, even
inside America. Usually by leveraging corporate interests that want to do business in China.
From the NBA banning Americans protesting in support of Hong Kong...
To Zoom sending American user data to the Chinese Government...
To CBS censoring its own shows for criticizing censorship in China.
Yeah, that was ironic. Sorry, I meant tragic.
But what about Google?
Google has been trying to get back in the China market for years. It tried
to secretly create a censored search app for the Chinese Communist Party.
One US general has said that Google’s work in China is benefitting China’s military.
So what does that mean for YouTube, which is owned by Google—and
for channels on YouTube that talk about China in ways the Chinese Communist Party might not like?
Joining me today to talk about that is Matt Tye, better known as LaoWhy86,
who runs his own YouTube channel on China.
Matt, thanks for joining me today.
Hey, thank you so much, Chris.
So in a recent video, you suggest YouTube may be compromised by the CCP. Why do you think that?
Sure. Well, I've had a really big problem between all three of our channels. I mean,
I run Laowhy86, which is my own, I run ADVChina together with Winston over on SerpentZA
and then we collab on each other's channels all the time. Also we run the ADV Podcasts and all of
them are surrounding China content, China-based content particularly they're recently about
the Chinese government. And although we've had videos demonetized or suggested for limited ads
basically, it's their nice way of saying it. We've had a recent problem where videos are
getting manually reviewed. So what that means is in the past YouTube kind of decides, okay,
this video is limited ads. So you're not going to get monetization on this, and there's nothing you
can do about it. But so many people complained and they kind of changed the way they do things to be
more transparent about why you're not getting ads or how they came up with that decision.
And what they suggest now is that you upload your videos ahead of time so that they can
actually have a physical reviewer. Now, I don't know if this works on smaller channels, but on
bigger channels, they'll have a physical person, a real human being to watch your video and say,
this is okay, so that it won't get affected in the future. It can't get flagged, it won't get taken
down. It's already manually reviewed by YouTube. So what's recently been happening and I have three
concrete examples on my video on Laowhy86, I made a video called Taiwan is a Country,
even if you wish it really wasn't. And basically what happened was it was manually reviewed by a
human being as being totally fine so I was getting ads on it. And then all of a sudden it was again
demonetized. It was demonetized after it had been manually reviewed. So I was very confused because
when I went into this new transparent YouTube system about how they kind of come up with this
conclusion, it said that that video had been demonetized because of video game violence.
Now, my channel has nothing to do with video games, obviously, no, I wasn't playing like
a Taiwan video game simulator and GTA V or anything. This had nothing to do with
actually what the content was about. So I was very confused, I went on to the live chat on YouTube,
and of course they bumped me up to their internal team, the good old YouTube internal team,
which they looked at the video and quite quickly said, "Oh yeah, it's totally fine.
Congratulations, good news your video is monetized again." And that got me thinking
why not pursue this and see what their decision-making process was?
So I said, you know what's going on? It was flag what was the decision making process
that made this originally fine but then another manual reviewer came in and said,
it's not fine? And they just completely avoided that conversation and said, "Yeah,
thanks for your cooperation. Thanks for your feedback. That's great." There was no
transparency involved. So they've effectively made this transparent system to say that your
videos are monetized or demonetized for a reason, but then they won't actually tell you that reason,
even after it's already been falsely accused is something that it's not.
What are the consequences of a demonetized video for you?
So this is something I think YouTube likes to deny. They like to say that the monetization of
a video has nothing to do with its performance, right? The thing is when a video gets demonetized
across all three of our channels or all four of our channels, actually what we'll see is
that the performance of a video will spike when it's monetized and it will be very,
kind of very stable. It won't really grow if it's demonetized, if it has that yellow check mark.
And that's just our evidence like on our end, but I've also heard other channels for example,
I heard something from Ethan Klein on H3 Podcasts talk about how they've proven that basically you
could watch the spike of the graph. If a video gets demonetized like halfway through its life,
it will stop getting views basically.
There's no incentive for YouTube to want to recommend content that isn't making them money.
Especially if it's content that's getting falsely flagged for reasons that they
might perceive as being offensive, or they don't want to offend their audience, right?
If YouTube is caught recommending a content that someone might deem offensive according to all the
flags that they're getting, then at the end of the day, YouTube might be complicit in that content.
And so you think how you got flagged for
a video game violence, that was like something somebody purposely did?
So this is my theory is that if you go onto the Chinese side of the internet,
on the other side of the Great Firewall of China, if you are searching things in Chinese,
you can find forums about both me and SerpentZA and there's entire basically walkthroughs
and there's thousands of pages of this stuff, but walkthroughs on how to use a VPN, get on a VPN,
go to YouTube, find our content, I saw your content on there, Chris, as well.
Oh good.
Of course, to go on our content and then to flag it for different reasons,
how to actually flag it, how to change your browser into Chinese when you go to YouTube,
you know how to do all these things. And the reason being is that they're voluntary
wumaos, voluntary fifty-cent armies that would like to take our content down. And this is one
of the only ways that they can conceive of doing this. Now, we've also found Western YouTubers,
American YouTubers doing the exact same thing, following that same playbook, showing how to go
onto all of our content and flag us as this and this and this, whether it's for racism,
whether it's for bullying, whether it's for harassment, video game violence, or whatever.
What I think happened and this is what happened on our ADVChina video for the Tiananmen Square
monument that we visited and paid tribute to, is that they found that maybe the YouTube
reviewers are very lax on the whole video game violence thing. Maybe they'll just say, yeah,
it's video game violence because there's a ton of that out on YouTube and just kind of,
oh, whatever. Yeah, let's demonetized after it's been flagged for that reasoning. Or the
other theory is that there's someone in there that's constantly getting flags on our content
because we know that that's happening. We know that, for example, on one of SerpentZA's video,
he did a video on the century of humiliation and that's kind of what spurned the whole
tutorial thing. So we know that basically they'll find any reason to report a video.
In that case, it was an old man who walked into the camera, like into the shot and then they
flagged that for bullying an old man, the video is completely removed. Now, in that case, it wasn't
even demonetized it's just removed. So we think that there's probably either someone sympathetic
to that within the YouTube moderation sphere, which you know that the idea is really difficult
to prove but the same time, how can somebody whose job is to manually sit down and watch a video,
say, "Yes, this has been flagged for video game violence. And yes, I'm going to approve this."
Certainly that's all traceable within Google, the people who moderate there's a trail,
there's a paper trail of the moderators that are actually flagging content. So it wouldn't
be impossible to prove, but it would be impossible to prove without someone to
be able to go in there and look at the content and see who was moderating and why they clicked that.
And has YouTube responded in any way to your concerns?
No. So I put that video out and concern I wanted to bring attention for people like yourself
people like SerpentZA, people like me. I wanted people to understand that this is different than
a normal video that someone might find offensive. This is potentially thousands and thousands
of flags coming at these channels, which is going to do whether they ignore them or not,
it's going to do something in the whole zeitgeist of how the content system works,
moderation system works in YouTube. If you're seeing constant barrages of flags on a certain
type of content, eventually something's going to happen and that we're starting to see that now.
I'll admit that the whole mass demonetization has gotten a little bit better since they made
the whole human moderation process a thing. But at the same time now we're seeing people physically,
actively okaying flags on these videos that are not... They're completely irrelevant to
the content. And what we've noticed is that it's always on very, very sensitive topics.
So if we look at the three concrete examples that I have Taiwan is a Country, I mean,
chairman, she literally says, "Taiwan is our most controversial issue." If we look at the Tiananmen
Square, the monument video, the video is literally called the Chinese Government's
not Going to like What we Found in the Desert, very sensitive issue for China, The Century of
Humiliation on SerpentZA's video, incredibly sensitive issue. It's never stuff about,
you know maybe it's stuff that pokes fun or maybe satire. It's never that kind of
stuff. It's always very, very cutting and very, very sensitive topics that get hit.
Well in your video, you say the Chinese Communist Party
is winning the propaganda war. Why do you say that?
I say the Chinese Communist Party is winning the propaganda war I mean, partially I'm referring
to the soft power that they put out there on YouTube. And what I mean by winning is
that there's not a mass army of people in other countries that are reporting their content. To
me for someone that has actually been affected by the Communist Party of China and sees the absolute
atrocities that they commit, for me to see the Chinese Government able to post freely on the
Western internet to try and sway opinion in the Western World or in other countries to me that's
offensive to me. But I'm not going out there reporting their content and you're not finding
thousands or millions of potential people getting paid or voluntarily going to report their content
either. So when I say they're winning, they're actively using Western platforms and freedom
of speech that they themselves ban in their own country to spread their own oppressive message.
And I just find that kind of ironic because you have numbers on your side. So when someone like
me or you, or Winston tries to put out content and information and stuff that we truly believe
about the Communist Party of China, and we get mass attacks, mass flags,
not to mention the death threats and all that other kind of stuff that I'm sure you're very
familiar with, they don't have to deal with that. So from that aspect, they're winning,
they have the platform and the tools to do that, the money to do that and the audience to do that.
Why is the Chinese Communist Party so concerned about what YouTube shows have to say about China?
Well, I think there's a couple of reasons. One thing that really bothers the Chinese Communist
Party is that they're worried that when a Chinese person does in fact use a VPN, maybe it's an
English savvy person. When they go over to the other side of the internet, they want to make
sure that they have enough content for them to consume, to confirm their internal bias. So
we know how the Chinese brainwashing system works and the education system of Government of China.
People are, if they're a little bit curious, I'm not talking about dissidence or anything,
if they're a little bit curious and they want to hop over to the English speaking internet
or a place where they can freely express their opinions or consume other opinions,
they want to make sure that there is enough domestic type media there. So you got CGTN,
you have pro-CCP Western YouTubers that are definitely a huge force right now in terms of
attracting Chinese nationalist audiences on the other side of the internet.
And they want to make sure that it's kind of a safe place. So it's just people like us,
our dissenting voices are actually kind of drown out in that whole mess, but there's also the other
thing is that China has a huge prerogative to want to sway Western opinion to make
its own system look good. So when you hear all of this news, let's say, or opinions from us about
how oppressive freedom of speech is, the freedom of religion and all these issues that China
has really horrible track record with. When you hear about all these things,
but then you hear a ton of other opinions that kind of drown that out, or kind of make that less
reliable and you see other people able to post on YouTube on these supposedly websites that
are blocked in China, Facebook and YouTube, but how do these people get away with it? How
does this person walk around with a camera in China and just say whatever they like?
It starts to create questioning in people's minds and when you have mainstream media here in the
U.S. that really just preys on the insecurities of people and really likes to big up chaos and
all kinds of busy clickbait media, when you have this kind of zeitgeist, but then you see this
bastion of stability that China likes to portray. It all of a sudden becomes a little bit more
palatable in authoritarian system like China. Number two, you have China's prerogative of
just wanting to have soft power throughout the world, whether it's financially benefiting them or
diplomatically as well. So it's not just Americans that are watching the Chinese media stuff.
It's not just their prerogative to... I'm trying to formulate here, but our channels for them are
dangerous because it offers a differing opinion to something they dumped millions and millions
of dollars and man hours into trying to portray. It flies in the face of all that. So if we have a
big enough audience, that's a big threat to their hegemony. It's a big threat to their influence.
So moving forward, what are you guys going to do?
I mean, honestly, like an interview like this, where we're talking about it openly,
we're all in the same boat here. We'd like to see YouTube actually be a little bit more
transparent I'd like them to reach out to me [inaudible 00:13:47] and tell us why content is
being flagged. I want to know is the concept being flagged, what is being flagged for and why someone
would manually review that content as something that it's not? I don't want a reply in this email
chain to be like, "Oh, we thank you for your cooperation." I want to know why?
When I ask why I expect a reason why. As a content creator, we're putting our intellectual property,
we're putting our ideas and hard work out there. I expect to know why something happened.
I understand that I, you and Winston are using a platform that has community guidelines and rules,
but those community guidelines and rules haven't been broken in these videos that I'm
referring to. So I'd like to them to
not just say that they're being transparent with these new tools of human moderation,
but telling... Giving concrete reasons as to why content is still being demonetized or removed.
Well, thanks for joining me today and sharing this story with us.
You're welcome, Chris. Thank you for having me.
So at this point I think it’s pretty important to like and share this episode so more people
can know about how the Chinese Communist Party is influencing what you can watch on YouTube.
Also, coming out today is the 100th episode of the China Unscripted podcast,
and I had both Matt from Laowhy86 and Winston from SerpentZa (Corner Box both) on for an
incredible interview. Check out the link below for that.
I’ve also put a link to Matt’s episode below,
be sure to check it out and subscribe to his channel as well.
Once again I’m Chris Chappell, see you next time.