 Hello, how's it going? I wanted to take a moment to talk about the ongoing problems that YouTube is having. I'm sure you've seen a bunch of videos from a bunch of different YouTubers at this point about everything going on with YouTube, specifically with the age restriction stuff. And I thought that I would add my two cents because I think it's important, you know, when there's these problems at YouTube, a lot of times because of the way that YouTube operates with creators, we can't really solve these problems internally with YouTube. We kind of got to speak our minds a little bit. And I feel like as a larger creator, it's kind of my duty to try and to try and do this a little bit. So I wanted to talk about everything going on. And most of this stuff has already been been said, but with everything that just happened with my 10 year video that went up and got age restricted, I thought that I would give my two cents and give you a little bit in sight of what happened there and my experience with it and why I'm so frustrated with it. And it's not what you might seem. So all of this started a little bit over a week ago, maybe two weeks ago at this point with Cory X Kenchin, who is a really amazing YouTuber and a super, super solid dude. But he's a gaming creator here on YouTube and he's a black gaming creator, which is relevant to what I'm about to tell you. So Cory made a video about racism and favoritism on YouTube. I'll leave his video in the description. You should definitely go and watch it. But I'll give you a quick rundown of everything that happened. Make sure to go and watch this video though, because I will not probably say everything completely accurately because I'm just paraphrasing here. But basically what happened was he had a mortuary assistant video. Mortuary assistant has been a really big game in the past couple of months. And it has a lot of stuff in there that YouTube inherently doesn't like. Like there's a lot of like self-harm stuff and there's a lot of like violence and stuff like that. And so he posts this video and he gets an ending with a particular very graphic depiction of self-harm that's in the game. And so he posts the video and it gets age restricted. And so he's like, okay, interesting. Now keep in mind for those of you who don't know Cory, he is a really family-friendly YouTuber. Like he doesn't swear or anything like that. Like he's pretty squeaky clean. But he went on YouTube, looked up some other people who got the same ending that he did. One of them being Mark. And nobody else's videos were age restricted. And so he was like, okay, that's weird. I'll appeal the age restriction and see if I can get a manual review. And then they'll just let it fly. So he does that and his appeal gets rejected. And so he goes to his YouTube rep and he says, hey, can we get this sorted out? Like why is my video getting age restricted? But these other ones aren't. And so YouTube says, oh, sorry about that. Maybe we messed up a little bit. Here you go. They fixed it and unaged restricted his video. But then Cory went back, which I thought was awesome that he went back at them and was like, well, hold on though. That doesn't fix the problem because it still happened in the first place. Why did my video get age restricted? And these other videos didn't. And so he brought up to YouTube that he thought that like there could be potential racism or favoritism at play where, you know, Mark is one of the biggest creators on the platform so that they don't want to strike him with an age restriction. And so YouTube then tripled down and they re-age restricted his video and then age restricted Mark's video and then anybody else who had that same ending. So it was just a very weird. And again, please go watch Cory's video because he has he has receipts for everything. He explains it way better than I ever could, obviously. But Cory brought up a really good point of how there is a lot of favoritism on YouTube's end. And I think so much vagueness and there is no transparency when it comes to the communication between YouTube and the creators. There's absolutely none at all. I've been doing YouTube for 10 years now. I have two million subs, which nowadays on YouTube isn't like crazy big, but I'm still considered like a bigger YouTuber. This is my full-time job. I've been doing it for a really long time. I still don't have a personal contact at YouTube. It's really hard to get a personal contact. But still, there are things that are much more in my favor, which I'll talk about soon. So after posting that video, a lot of other YouTubers started talking about everything going on and just sort of spreading the word about this, which I think is awesome because this shouldn't be happening at all. YouTube needs to be more transparent. I think that YouTube, there's no way that YouTube can say that there isn't, at the very least, favoritism at play because it doesn't make sense that someone plays the exact same game than somebody else and one person gets age-restricted over the other. It doesn't make sense. At first, you could blame it on, oh, it's the automated system picking it up and false-flagging it. But that doesn't make sense when you then hit the video with a manual review and then the person is like, oh yeah, no, this isn't good. It's like, okay, well, why are the other videos fine? It doesn't make sense at all. And then on top of that, YouTube is not really transparent at all. As far as the, we'll call it, the average creator backend, when you get hit with an age restriction, most of the time it's just, we don't think your content is, we don't deem your content to be safe for people under 18. But they never give a reason why. So it's never like, oh, from this timestamp to this timestamp is the content in question. We don't like this. If it was something like that, then it would be so much better and it would be understandable because I get from a business end, they want to try and be more ad-friendly because the more ads, the more money they get and that's all they care about. But at least from there, it could be like, okay, I can avoid this stuff in the future or I can go into the YouTube's editor thing and trim out that, that timestamp. And then the video will be fine. But YouTube does not have enough transparency with people unless you get special treatment, which is the thing that I'm really upset about. It sucks so hard that even with Corey being as gigantic as he is, Corey has almost 15 million subs and his videos get an insane amount of views. He gets like 5 to 10 million views per video. So he is by no means a small creator. He is a gigantic powerhouse of a YouTuber and it sucks that even a person at his size is still not getting clear answers from YouTube. It's absolutely ridiculous and in my mind it's completely unacceptable. Like I don't understand why YouTube can't just be more transparent. It's not like they don't have the staff, it's not like they don't have the capabilities to be able to do that. I don't understand why YouTube has to be so vague about this stuff. So again, make sure you check out Corey's video and Corey if you're watching this hats off to you for clapping back at YouTube because that takes some balls and I'm really happy that you did because everybody is at the whim of YouTube. YouTube can kind of just do whatever they want and so without people like you inspiring everybody to sort of speak their mind and speak up and speak out, they might just continue to get away with stuff like this so everybody make sure to go check out Corey if you for some reason don't know who he is and make sure to watch his video on it because it's a fantastic video. But from that I want to talk a little bit about my experience in the past few days with the things that happened on my end with my 10 year montage going up and that getting age restricted because that was something that really took the wind out of my sails and it was something that once I finally got answers I was really really frustrated by. So a few days ago on August 29th it was my 10 year celebration on YouTube I've been doing YouTube for a decade now and so I wanted it to be a special day and I wanted a special video to come out and so I talked to my friend Catherine who most of you know but Catherine obviously edited for Mark and then she edited for me for a bit and she made the last montage that went up on my YouTube channel which was five years ago now which is crazy that that is flown by so fast but she did the five year montage so I went to her and I was like hey would you like to make the 10 year montage for YouTube that's coming up this was like over six months ago so she said yes put in tens of hours like I don't probably upwards of 100 hours of work she went through 10 years of my channel and made it down into a two and a half hour montage of like some of the best clips and the most memorable moments and it was a video that she did such a fantastic job on and I think it like really represented the heart and the soul of the channel and it was so cool being able to go every single year from the first year all the way up until now taking the best moments and the best memories it was such a good video and I was so excited about it and so I wanted to make it this sort of big event on the channel we did a YouTube premiere with it so then people could talk in chat in the live chat and watch everybody's watching at the same time I was super excited about it because it was such a good video and I was excited for that to be a big staple of the channel and to be able to show that video off a bunch but then YouTube came around it had to been either late that night or maybe the next day and they hit it with an age restriction which was a big old bummer so if you don't know about what happens with an age restriction it's anybody who has an account that is under 18 years of age or anybody that's not logged into a YouTube account cannot watch it so if you're logged into an account and your account information says that you're under 18 you can't watch it but then also people who are not using a YouTube account and are just like watching casually they can't view the video so it really suppresses the video a lot like the views are one thing like that sucks that it can't get the views that it could have if it was not age restricted the thing that I get really upset about is that I had people tweeting me that were like yeah it booted me off mid viewing it because I'm 16 or whatever which sucks so bad so I sent an appeal for the age restriction and keep in mind this video is almost two and a half hours long it's two hours and 23 minutes long within 10 minutes of me submitting that appeal I got rejected from a manual review a manual review so obviously I got upset about it and I tweeted I tweeted Twitter and I contacted my manager I don't have a personal contact at YouTube but my manager knows people at YouTube so I basically have I have a form of contact but it's ridiculous because it's like okay I sent this in for a manual review how could you have done an adequate job at manually reviewing this video in 10 minutes that's two and a half hours long it literally is impossible so I got really upset obviously because it's like how how is this real and so my manager God bless his soul he sent a pretty scathing email to YouTube being like hey he didn't say these words but you know what the hell is going on like why is this happening why did the repeal happen or why did the rejection happen so quickly can we get some answers please can we get somebody actually looking at the video please and so after a while I did get a response back and I'll show you that response here I'm gonna blur out any names any emails and stuff obviously and I do want to say before any of this like these are these people's jobs I don't blame this one person I very much appreciate that they took the time to try and figure stuff out they were just trying to give me answers so I just want to state like this person that was helping us was doing a great job I just wish that it was a little bit less vague because I think that you know this person is getting answers from other people so I just I just want to state really quick that the person that was helping us out was really great and he was super nice and I I sort of feel bad that we just sent this big like hey what the fuck is going on but they were wonderful anyway got an email back reaching out on behalf of YouTube's community outreach team our colleagues from team YouTube flag me that you had questions about the age restriction applied to your 10 years of crank gameplays I brought your video to the attention of our specialists who carefully reviewed it and would like to share some information with you so this email got to me okay so it was August 30th the day after it was posted at 3 45 pm and the original email was sent at 8 17 pm so assuming that they hopped on immediate like they had adequate time to actually watch the video it's like YouTube has always been committed to creating safest platform blah blah blah same time YouTube has the responsibility to offer a safe environment for all audience including those who are under 18 years of age blah blah blah blah with this context in mind upon careful review of the content our specialist confirmed that the video violates our vulgar language policy while the video is allowed to stay on the platform it will remain age restricted with that I bring to you the vulgar language policy I don't know how much of a policy this is some language may not be appropriate for viewers under 18 we may consider the following factors when deciding whether to age restrict or move content use of sexually explicit language or narratives use of excessive profanity in your video use of heavy profanity in your videos title thumbnail or associated metadata so the one specifically that they were hitting me with here was the use of excessive profanity in the video when making this compilation Catherine downloaded all of the videos from my channel except because of the software that she was using she was unable to download anything that was age restricted that means that none of the videos that were used in the montage none of those original videos were age restricted ever but now put in a compilation they are so at first glance you might think oh it's because you have back-to-back clips of you swearing which is maybe what I thought but that wasn't the case because later my manager asked for specifics of hey can you give us timestamps can you give us any more information to share further the violative content occurs at 823 to 830 hold that clip up for you now this is seven seconds of content seven seconds of a two and a half hour long video and it just I wish I wish that there would have been a way that they could have said that from the very very beginning when you get a copyright strike on youtube which in theory I guess might be easier but when you get a copyright claim and somebody flags your video and says hey you're using my song they put some timestamps there from two minutes to three minutes you have this song that's happening do you own this song do you have a license blah blah blah blah blah blah you can choose to mute it you can choose to cut it if you can prove that you have a license then there's that whole thing and then it'll get greenlit again but they have that so I'm wondering why they can't do the same thing here with the original your video is age restricted it is age restricted for this it's age restricted because of the vulgar language policy and the content in question is from here to here why can't that be the first message that occur like obviously they it at the very least the system on its own should be able to recognize because if it shouldn't then it the system doesn't work correctly but it should be able to recognize this is why I'm flagging the video so why do I just get a vague your content has been age restricted we deem that it's unsafe for people under 18 why can't it immediately tell me why it's being age restricted so the biggest reason why I'm so upset about this particular thing and again huge thank you to the wonderful person at YouTube who is helping us out because they were giving us the information that we needed they were responding in a timely manner nothing against them I really appreciate their time and I do sort of feel bad for some people at YouTube who get so much flak on YouTube's behalf because it's not the employees at YouTube that are working with the partners it's usually upper-end people but anyway the thing that I'm most upset about is that I still got special treatment like I got special treatment I know that Sean had talked to a few people at YouTube you know he gets special treatment even like Cory had this this issue obviously but he still gets special treatment at YouTube i.e. getting to talk to actual people at YouTube because if my manager hadn't gone to YouTube themselves and said hey what the f**k is going on then this wouldn't have been fixed and I wouldn't have been able to see where the content was in the video where the seven seconds of content was in the video to tell me why it was age restricted and so it makes me really upset and also really worried for the future of YouTube and also the future content creators because people who are smaller don't have those contacts people who are smaller can't get in contact with YouTube to figure this stuff out so when they get age restricted or when they get a strike or when something happens even like hopefully like if their channel got you know deleted or hacked or something who do they talk to because it doesn't seem like YouTube's doing a good job at being transparent and letting people know what the issues are and how to fix them they just say oh this video isn't suitable or oh you got a copyright strike sorry there's nothing that you can do about it so it makes me really upset and really worried that I had to go through I had to jump through all these hoops to get into contact with YouTube while still getting special treatment and still having the privilege of a larger content creator when other smaller YouTubers would never get this kind of treatment and they would just have their videos suffer or have their videos get deleted or you know I'm sure that there are channels out there that have had their videos flagged um have had their videos flagged when they shouldn't have been and I'm sure that there are channels that have gotten terminated because of that and all of this stuff has been like yeah we a friend of mine my friend Marcus formerly living brutality his videos or sorry his channel got completely terminated and I can't remember why I'd love to talk to him about that actually I should I should ask him about that but years ago his entire channel completely terminated was never given answers he cannot get it back all of that stuff is completely gone years and years and years of content completely gone forever and he never got an answer and it was never fixed and it probably will never be fixed so those I guess are my thoughts and that's what happened with uh with my video the other day I did put up a censored version as kind of a fuck you to YouTube it was a bit petty um as far as right now goes my um my montage the original one is still age restricted I went in to YouTube's editor and trimmed out that portion of the video but there's still an age restriction on it I don't know if they'll take it off um we'll see I guess um but yeah it just kind of sucks I uh I don't know why YouTube isn't and seems to not want to be more transparent um they this has always been an issue though you know it's been for different things you know at one point it was what is ad friendly what is not you know there were people getting claims everywhere um for back then still for like swearing too much and shit like that um so you know I think it's I think it's never gonna not be an issue about YouTube being transparent um but I wish they would be um and as far as I know I don't think YouTube has said anything publicly about anything um about the age restrictions about Corey's video about anything like that um I could be wrong though but I personally have not seen anything so if anybody has seen something uh an article or a tweet or anything like that um please let me know because I'd love to look at that but as far as I know YouTube hasn't publicly said anything or acknowledged Corey's video so yeah those are my thoughts just wanted to share and hopefully this helps sort of spread the word and gets uh contributes to putting a fire under YouTube's ass because they definitely need it