I Am Off YouTube

Not that I did a whole lot on there. I had a bunch of videos, the most important of which were albums from bands in my former life, and albums from others that weren’t uploaded there. I’m not a prophet but I can read the writing on the wall (archive):

We also work to make sure that the line between what is removed and what is allowed is drawn in the right place. Our policies prohibit misleading viewers about where and how to vote. We also disallow content alleging widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. Presidential election. However in some cases, that has meant allowing controversial views on the outcome or process of counting votes of a current election as election officials have worked to finalize counts.

Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come. As always, news coverage and commentary on these issues can remain on our site if there’s sufficient education, documentary, scientific or artistic context.

Keep in mind, this was posted about a month ago, before this week’s more aggressive deplatforming and purging. Not that I care much about the election or politics in general; there was nothing in my videos about any of that. Just the fact that I vaguely prefer very slightly one half of the American uniparty political system over the other would make me a target if I were important enough (I’m barely a blip on anyone’s radar).

So I moved my old bands’ album videos to my own server space here, linked from my About page, moved all my subscriptions to my RSS reader, and set up an anonymous YouTube account for my music playlists. WordPress so far has been good with remaining content-neutral, and being self-hosted in that regard doesn’t hurt, either. But, the future doesn’t look to bright if things will continue down the same path.