I do apologize about the last post. I keep dealing with anti Section 230 people because they don’t understand it. All they know is it is a political talking point that is being used to “fight anti censorship of right wing people” when that’s not true at all. In fact, it is a purposeful distraction to make sure you don’t see the real thing screwing with the internet. Again, I am doing research into the PATRIOT ACT more right now but… sheesh…. This thing really did a number on the world; not just the US.
For today’s part I would like to go over advertising on the internet. Normally I put all my terms into a block for international readers at the start because it is assumed western readers will understand. However, due to this weirdness of this post I will be putting the explanations of things when they are brought up.
Who knows when YouTube’s first Adpocolypse was? Who knows what the Adpocolypse is? Well, it is when an event on or off the website causes advertisers to pull out of the site. Which then forces YouTube to enact stricter rules and policies to keep advertisers making the site much worse.”Oh I know this! It’s when Pewd—” Let me stop you there. Believe it or not Pewdiepie wasn’t even on YouTube when the first Adpoc (short for Adpocolypse) hit. This dates back to a old 4Chan raid on YouTube and where the meme “I am 12 years old. What is this?” came from.
In the long long ago 4Chan used to do raids. One of which was where they decided to upload porn disguised as kids content. The op (short for operation) was simple. Upload hardcore porn named as a kids TV show. So when kids went to watch a Jonas Brother’s video they instead saw porn. This raid went off without a hitch, surprisingly. Everything was good until the videos were being reported, but this was expected. Some guys went as far as uploading the first minute of a Jonas Brother’s music video then the rest was porn. Others uploaded sections of kids TV shows and then after the 45 second mark would randomly splice in and play porn for anywhere from 2-10 seconds and then cut back to the kids show. Rinse and repeat throughout the video. Some gents even used YouTube search engine optimization, SEO, to get their videos to the top so kids would watch it.
Outside of the meme “I am 12 years old and what is this?” this raid is largely forgotten. I think BBC did a article on it and that was it. What happened after is YouTube worked on porn detection software after this raid and easier reporting tools. Which has now spawned to detecting way more things on the not approved list. The reason YouTube had to make these new tools is because advertisers dropped a bit. Some people complained to the companies that their kids saw porn on their shows on YouTube. Laughs were had by all at HQ. However, this sparked the first Adpoc. It didn’t last long. Advertisers were happier with the new tools.
“Oh. Well, the second was when P-” Wrong again. The second Adpoc not only hit YouTube but it hit Facebook and Twitter too. However, Facebook came out unscathed and Twitter got screwed pretty hard. The second Adpoc was when al-qaeda used to use social media to recruit. “Bull shit!” I often hear but no this really happened. For some reason this never became a big story. You don’t hear about it outside of people making fun of old Twitter these days but it did happen.
The story here is Al-Qaeda used social media to recruit people to a surprising degree of success. While YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter knew about this the governments of the world told them to keep the profiles up so they could monitor them. This led to a few arrests and deaths of some prominent terrorists. It’s better to have your enemies thinking they are secure then using actual secure tools like they are now. Eventually people were getting banned from the sites and then would post pictures of terrorist cell accounts. This brought light to the entire event. Facebook purged all accounts in an instant. YouTube purged most and worked hard on getting them on. Twitter deleted the big ones and left tons of smaller ones.
Advertisers were not happy with this. This caused another Adpoc but on all sites. They came back to Facebook really quick and YouTube shortly after. Twitter however stayed there licking its wounds for the longest. This one I 100% get. Why would you want your ads playing next to or before a terrorist recruiting video. I also understand what the governments were doing but this entire situation was handled poorly by the social media sites.
“Now is it Pew-” No. The third Adpoc came from racist YouTube videos! “Wait..” It’s different. Also disclaimer. I don’t know if this happened before or after the terrorist videos 100%. I think it was after but I could be mixing up the events of these two. This is the era of YouTube that many kind of forgets to exists. When videos of people uploading videos holding guns going “This gun here’ll kill that nigger Obama. I’m not saying it’ll be me but this gun’ll do it.”
This era of YouTube did a lot of damage to YouTube in the long term.While you saw tons of racist videos at the time many were played very straight face. So it was hard to tell which videos were jokes. Due to advertisers leaving over this many new strict rules were applied. Also a lot of research went into auto detection software. During this Adpoc accounts were just deleted. No notifications. Just one day you were there then gone. Many thought this would be the end of YouTube because people’s videos were getting taken down over user comments too. Rather then keep that going they started to ban users over comments. Somehow for this one some of the advertisers came back.
“Wow, 4 before? Are there anymore?”- Maybe, but not as far as I can tell or remember. Now, for the 5th Adpoc is the Pewdiepie event! Pewdiepie is a YouTuber who used to play games and now just does meme reviews. The funny thing to me is his event coined the term Adpoc but he caused the 5th one on the site. What happened here? While streaming on Twitch he paid someone on Fiver, a website where you pay someone $5 to do something, to hold up a sign about Jews as a joke. Just to see if the guy would do it. To everyone’s surprise the guy did. Despite this not happening on YouTube it caused a massive advertiser exodus due to every news site covering it and slamming YouTube and Pewdiepie. Even with new strict rules put into effect and adding the yellow icon of death, this is where ads will be limited by those who approve of offensive content, to YouTube a lot of advertisers didn’t come back.
Unlike the others this caused a lot of permanent damage to YouTube’s adshare program. While the other Adpocs caused minimal advertiser damages in the long run they did add a set of stricter and stricter rules/tools. However, the Adpoc didn’t end at YouTube. Due to all the news stories and many people seeing how much this upset advertisers this affected websites as a whole. Twitter had to make new rules and so did Facebook. This Adpoc showed everyone that if you fuck up big enough, or have a big enough target, you will ruin the internet. For some reason no one seems to understand it is the advertisers that put us in this situation and not the websites, or Section 230.
Adpoc 6 people know as the Carlos Maza situation. Which is where Maza caused a giant shit storm on Twitter over a YouTuber making fun of him with a t-shirt. This led to more advertisers pulling out and YouTube censoring all political content for a bit. Which Maza later said he never intended for left wing views to be silenced. Then double downed that it is good he ruined YouTube. The cock. This led to even more tools that have fucked YouTube hard and get updated monthly it seems. Carlos later lost his job at Vox and tried to make a YouTube channel and cried about it being too hard to make money on it. If you wanted to know the end of that situation.
Adpoc 6 is another case of bullshit off of YouTube causing advertisers to leave forcing YouTube to take care of shit off of the site somehow. This also affected Twitter because people were outing Twitter for stuff they were allowing. Now Twitter has admitted they are having a hard time keeping ads because they keep pulling out over offensive content.
While Adpoc 1-4 might not be considered it by many because ads came back. I still consider them Adpocs because of the lasting damages done elsewhere and showing the power we have at killing websites. 5&6 both destroyed YouTube and Twitter. Not only that other sites are eating shit over them allowing free speech due to it too. However, people are blaming the sites for cracking down on fun instead of just trying to stay afloat.
Is there a way we can counter this? Yeah, whenever an advertisers is being targeted or a big Adpoc like event happens contact advertisers and say “If you pull ads I won’t support your company.” We have to let advertisers know we want them on their websites. If they leave then in comes censorship. The worst thing? Advertisers are all using US morals too. For instance, if you show a company something that is culturally acceptable in Asia or the EU and you spam the US branch the US branch will pull ads based off of their local morals and not international ones. Which adds to US companies controlling the internet for everyone.
Now this one was over how advertisers have fucked over the internet. The truth is they were reacting to bad shit happening. Every company wants that squeaky clean brand image. Which is funny for Coke to say they don’t want to be before a bad YouTube video when they hired hitmen to take out union leaders in South America or Nestle printing ad after ad in Africa saying their baby formula is better then breast milk. If you want to fix Twitter and YouTube you have to convince advertisers to come back and run ads on mature content. That’s really it.
Oh there was an adpoc 7 that was kicked off by a US law being passed preventing targeting ads to children. This caused a lot of channels to get screwed over and if your channel appears on YouTube kids you can’t get full ad rev. Funnily enough a US law prevents stuff like booze and cigs from advertising on YouTube which would fix the whole mature ad situation. Putting an end to some of the Adpoc issues.
The next post should be over the PATRIOT ACT. This is a doozy and it explains shit that Patreon is doing now and all the censorship beyond advertisers. Like what happened to GAB. Not only that it leads to entire countries being banned from payment processing.