 And for quite some time now, YouTube has been actively suppressing mental health content. So I uploaded this video, I let YouTube know that it was good to go when it came to monetization because I was not violating any of their guidelines, and yet after I uploaded it, it was pretty shortly thereafter demonetized. Discussion of modern acts of terror events resulting in the catastrophic loss of human life or controversial social issues. Hello there, my beautiful, lovely, delightful, and talented, did I mention good-looking internet friends? Welcome back to my channel. Thank you so much for joining me here today on Footless Show, where I am still Joe, I am still missing a foot, and we are going to talk about a very serious issue that YouTube itself, like the platform that you are watching this video on right now, has that I've heard very few people, if anyone, address. This is something that has directly affected me and many people I know, and I truly believe that it's also affecting you, even though you might not be aware of it. For quite some time now, YouTube has been actively suppressing mental health content. I believe this is especially important to bring light to right now in 2021, as many people are suffering with mental health issues for the first time in their lives after dealing with loss, and grief, and change, and isolation, and quarantine. I don't think anyone is arguing the fact that more mental health resources and conversations need to be had, and one place that people turn for that is social media. For so many people, social media is the first place they're going to go for resources or information, or trying to find a community. And when that is actively being suppressed, I think that is a really big problem and something that needs to have light shed on it. So when I say that YouTube is actively suppressing mental health content, it sounds kind of ominous. So what am I suggesting? Am I saying that there's someone in a dark room somewhere being like, no, no mental health content for you? No, not at all. I don't think there's some master scheme going on behind the scenes. However, the same end result is occurring. So let's talk a little bit about how YouTube works. So I have been a creator here on YouTube for three and a half years. Footless Joe is not my first channel. I'm going to talk is a channel that I created back in 2017, which is still active, alive and growing, which I'm very grateful for, where I talked about life in the aftermath of trauma and mental health and dealing with PTSD and depression and anxiety attacks. And, you know, when life just explodes in your hands, how do you pick up the pieces? How do you figure out who you are again? How do you navigate that mental health journey? And then in 2018, I started this channel, Footless Joe, where I talked about my journey through losing my leg through antutation. But I also have talked about a lot of concepts relating to mental health here as well. You may have heard other creators talk about videos being monetized or demonetized. Now, this does obviously have an impact on the money that you as a creator make. However, that's not what I'm going to be discussing today. The larger issue in my opinion behind that is the fact that if a video gets demonetized, its reach is also limited. YouTube is a company for profit. It wants to make money. So if it can't run ads on your video or if it can't run as many ads on your video, it is understandably significantly less likely to be recommended or shown to you. It's not that videos that get demonetized are like deleted off of YouTube. It's just that their reach is significantly limited. So that's the first concept that's really important to understand in this discussion. The second thing is reasons why you get demonetized. What are things that are considered not advertiser friendly? In appropriate language, violence, adult content, shocking content, harmful or dangerous acts, and the list goes on. You may note here that talking about mental health is not a prohibited category. So if you were starting a brand new YouTube channel and you just got monetized, it's super exciting. You would take a look at this list to discover what you should and shouldn't talk about if you want that video in particular to be monetized. How the system is supposed to work in theory is if you avoid these issues, if you follow the guidelines, you'll be good. Your videos will be monetized. They'll go out to a lot of people. Okay, cool. However, specifically with mental health related content, that is not what happens the majority of the time. So being a creator here on YouTube with three and a half years of experience talking about mental health, I can tell you that even if you violate none of these policies, your videos will still most likely get demonetized. So a recent example is what pushed this issue over the edge for me, though it has been building for quite some time. And that was when I created a video talking about feeling anger and how that can be a healthy thing. Anger is not a super fun emotion for most people, but it's not a sensitive or controversial social issue. In that video I've linked it down below. I talk about feeling anger and how it's important part of the human experience and finding healthy ways to do that. So I uploaded this video. I let YouTube know that it was good to go when it came to demonetization because I was not violating any of their guidelines. And yet after I uploaded it, it was pretty shortly thereafter demonetized. And for a lot of the videos where I talk about mental health, I don't appeal the demonetization process because I'm like, well, maybe they don't like the fact that I mentioned the word anxiety. I don't know. But for this video, I knew that it didn't violate any of the guidelines and so I submitted it to review for a human reviewer. It came back after a human being watched it as ineligible for demonetization because they're cited reason. Discussion of modern acts of terror events resulting in the catastrophic loss of human life or controversial social issues. Now again, I invite you to watch this video. If you feel so inclined, let me know if I'm missing something here, but none of those categories are actually talked about. Then yesterday I uploaded this video where I talked about it's okay to be where you are in your mental health journey. So often I felt in my own journey of recovering from trauma and difficult things in my life, like I was behind, like I was failing, like I should be more better, I should be more recovered. And so I just spent two minutes, three minutes talking about the fact that wherever you are right now it's okay, there isn't a timeline. That one was also demonetized. At this point, honestly, most of the videos that I uploaded trauma talk, I do not even try to monetize because I know that I'm just gonna get dinged in their system even though I'm not actually violating any of their standards. There are two other facets of this that I think are worth talking about. Number one, with the ways the policies are currently set up where mental health content does routinely get demonetized, it discourages creators from sharing their stories. If you are a creator here on YouTube where you rely on this as a source of income as I do, and you know that if you create a video talking about dealing with depression or getting through something difficult or how you've had a panic attack and letting other people know that they're not alone in that, if you know that talking about that is going to get demonetized, your income is gonna be negatively impacted, that discourages people from sharing their stories when people need to hear them. The second thing that I've seen a lot of creators do is using ways to kind of get around this demonetization by never saying the word depression or PTSD or mental illness and just sort of hinting at it or putting it up on screen or censoring it. You can kind of trick the system and be able to talk about things that YouTube says it doesn't want you to talk about. But doing that makes it so difficult to view as a viewer if I'm talking about, again, for instance, depression, but I can't say that word. I can't use that term, so I have to keep tiptoeing around it and jumping around it. Someone is in a difficult place and they're looking for content relating to dealing with depression or getting through it or finding healthy ways to cope, dancing around the issue and never being able to actually say the word. Not only adds to the stigma that already exists, but makes it a much more stressful experience for your viewer because they might be guessing at what you're trying to say or trying to read between the lines. So there are ways that you can get around this if you wanna talk about mental health, but the ways that you get around it are so clunky and really hurt the experience for your viewers that I personally, for the most part, don't think it's really worth doing. So the reason that I'm making this video today is not to shake my fist and anger at YouTube and be like, give my videos monetization back, they deserve it, not at all. I have seen this happen over and over and over again with mental health content. YouTube is a place that people go to learn basically everything at this point. People go to YouTube to learn how to remodel their home and how to find help with their mental health. And it's content that talks about mental health, positive coping strategies, ways to get through difficult things, resources, community, mental health content in general. That's being suppressed by the algorithm that's made more difficult for people to find that's actively harming people. I think that's really detrimental. I think that's a bad call on YouTube's part. I very much understand that all mental health topics are not suitable for advertisers. I totally get that. Talking about self-harm or suicidal thoughts might not be something that an advertiser wants associated with them, but to extend that to basically everything related to mental health, be it anxiety or healthy ways to cope with anger or how to get through a stressful day. Talking about seeing yourself as a whole person after trauma is controversial and falls under the category of discussion of modern acts of terror. I think it's time to take a look at that rule because right now more than ever, I think people need this. I think people need to know that they're not alone, that they're not weird for struggling or having a hard time. Being able to easily find support and content on that topic that is presented in a healthy and beneficial way, that's really important. It's frustrating to exist in a system where you really can't talk about anything mental health related, otherwise you will most likely get demonetized and your reach will get suppressed and people will not see what you are putting out. And this is an issue that YouTube has the power to change. They could do something about this, so I'm asking them to. YouTube, the world looks to you for education, for resources, for entertainment, on every subject imaginable. You have so much power in everyday people's lives, so I'm asking you to make mental health content more accessible to make it easier for your creators to create and more understandable what your rules actually are, what we can and what we can't talk about, and also to re-examine how you prioritize this content as it is vital that people are able to find mental health resources when they need them. Sincerely yours, Joe. To you watching this video, thank you so much for watching it, for taking a few minutes out of your day to learn about this aspect of YouTube and to hear my story. I really appreciate it. You could be anywhere in the world doing anything else and you chose to hang out with me for a few minutes and listen to me speak, and that means a lot to me, thank you. As always, but especially today, I gigantic thank you to all of my patrons over on Patreon for financially supporting both of my channels and helping me do what I do here. Like I said, the majority of my videos on Trump Talk get demonetized, quite a few get demonetized here on Footless Joe as well. So to everyone who has the resources and has chosen to support me over on Patreon, I truly appreciate you, thank you. I love you all, I'm thinking about you and I'll see you in the next video. Bye guys. And her from the sky.