[sp0ck]

This is mass problem with almost any topic you want to share. I'm sport shooter, range officer and competition jury. You have no idea what crazy stunts YouTube do for Gun/Sport Shooting related content. YT terms containt some weirdest restriction for things like "shown magazine capacity". Wrong angle on video and your 10 round mag is seen by YouTube as 30 round and your video is gone.

You can show silencer disconnected from firearm, connected to firearm but showing moment you screwing it to end of barrel and your video is banned. There are dozens rules that are so vague that if YT wants he can remove any gun related content.

This is problem YT is not willing to fix because collateral damage costs are peanuts comparing to beeing sued and loose because some real illegal content slip trough filter. I don't expect any improvement here because there is no business justification.

[freedomben]

Indeed. A family member of mine had a helpful amount of income coming in from a channel of his that was gaining momentum. The point of the channel was to teach gun safety to people new to guns. Keep in mind that where we live, all of this is 100% legal and even encouraged, yet, YouTube threw so many ridiculous barriers in the way that he could not create much content That didn't end up getting removed. He eventually threw in the towel, and now people new to guns have less access to genuinely helpful information that might save their lives. It seems ironic to me that they had to aggressively remove anything that mentioned covid and didn't go exactly down the government line because otherwise it could get people killed, but they have no problem removing gun safety videos.

[ndriscoll]

That's because they are not a platform for education. They are a platform for ads and encouraging hyperconsumerism. They merely allow educational material, sometimes. Expect more videos to be removed over time that don't align with their goals. e.g. I would not expect playlists of hour-long MIT lectures to stay there for the long term as the platform moves more toward shorts and algorithmic recommendations. Or their vast library of people's old random amateur videos that barely get any views/generate almost no revenue while costing them money.

[hbn]

But the tech companies all replaced the gun emoji with a squirt gun like a decade ago, I thought all gun violence ended after that?

[amrocha]

Guns are not safe. No matter what you do, accidents will happen.

I don’t think Youtube is the place to look for education, and neither does youtube apparently.

It’d be pretty bad if someone watched youtube videos and thought they could handle guns safely and ended up hurt.

That doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me.

[christophilus]

Same for tobacco stuff. I follow a few pipe-tobacco reviewers, and YT has begun to tighten the clamp there, too.

It wouldn’t bother me if YouTube wasn’t basically a monopoly. I know some of them have been switching to Rumble, but to be honest, the competition is so fragmented that I don’t see any of them gaining critical mass.

[mvieira38]

We should host a tobacco related Peertube instance at this point. Get Muttnchop, Snus at Home and some other guys on it and we would be free from youtube

[threetonesun]

Host your own content, monetize your own blog. I get that not as many people can do it without access to the big platforms but... that's ok?

[philistine]

Are you aware that gun laws are not the same around the world and that YouTube likes to enjoy revenue worldwide?

I see all the rules you describe as an American company trying to marry the gun culture of the US with the far more reserved stance of the rest of the world.

[Rebelgecko]

Much of the world actually has less restrictive rules on silencers than the US, I think in a lot of European countries they're regulated comparably to or even law then firearms. I think the restrictions are more closely tied to the state where YouTube is based than to the overall gun laws of any particular country.