When Telling the Truth Gets You Ghosted by YouTube

WPS.News • May 17, 2025
Column by Staff Writer

So here’s the thing. A little video about Chinese nonsense in the West Philippine Sea goes up on YouTube. Nothing flashy. Just the kind of stuff journalists used to chase down with a pen, a camera, and some guts. Then it disappears. Not flagged. Not demonetized. Just quietly buried like last week’s garbage.

They call it shadow banning. Sounds like something out of a spy movie. In reality, it’s worse—it’s cowardice in code. Your video’s there, but no one can find it. You’re yelling into the void. And the void’s run by Silicon Valley execs who wouldn’t last five minutes in a real newsroom.

YouTube, that proud limb of the Google octopus, wants to tell you how to make videos. Optimize your thumbnails. Use these keywords. Tag this and that. Play their game, get more eyeballs. But when your content starts hitting nerves—real nerves—they ghost you. They smile, send you a link to the community guidelines, and go back to counting ad dollars from Beijing.

And don’t act surprised. These tech barons are so far up the backside of Communist China they’re practically fluent in Mandarin apologies. You step on the wrong toes, you’re out. Doesn’t matter if you’re right. Doesn’t matter if you’re a little guy with a big point. You just vanish from the algorithm like a mob informant in 1950s Cicero.

Meanwhile, the big players—the disinformation peddlers, the rage-fueled entertainers, the AI click farms—they rake it in. Because outrage sells. But truth? Truth has bills to pay. And nobody wants to foot that tab.

So what’s a guy to do? One option: build your own damn server, like China Today did when Taiwan had their back. Takes time. Takes money. But maybe it’s the only way forward. Because this ain’t about censorship anymore. This is about control. And it’s about fear.

And let’s be honest—we scared them. We started playing by their rules and winning. We used their own tools to reach more people, and they panicked. Because a guy with a message and a microphone is dangerous. Especially when he knows how to use both.

This isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern recognition.

YouTube’s silence on the appeal speaks volumes. So do the missing views, the vanished thumbnails, and the ghost town analytics. If this were a mob town, we’d know what to call it: intimidation. In techland, they just call it “policy.”

But here’s the part that really sticks: this whole thing was built with public money. DARPA, the Navy, good ol’ American tax dollars. The internet didn’t spring fully formed out of a Google server rack. We built it. Then we gave it away.

And now we’ve got billionaires telling us what’s allowed. What we can see. What we can say.

No, sir. Not today. Not ever.

So maybe we start small. A blog here. A video there. A Substack, a podcast, a homemade RSS feed. Underground media, just like the old neighborhood papers. Only this time, the front line is digital. And the stakes? A whole damn lot higher.

The revolution won’t be monetized.

But it sure as hell won’t be silenced.