YouTube Pulls Internet Comedian’s Ad Revenue For Mocking Political Correctness

By Alex GriswoldSep 1st, 2016, 9:34 am
 

YouTubePopular vlogger and online celebrity Philip DeFranco reported Wednesday that YouTube was beginning to pull all ad revenue from many of his videos after he put out a video mocking a “social justice warrior” obsessed with political correctness.

DeFranco, who has 4.5 million subscribers and over 1.6 billion views on just his primary channel, posted a video titled “Leaked Video of SJW LOSING IT Blows Up In Her Face.” In it, DeFranco spoke about a woman who verbally abused her Lyft driver for having a Hawaiian bobblehead doll, calling it offensive and “cultural appropriation.” The woman posted the video of the encounter online hoping to elicit sympathy, only to be laughed at for her hypersensitivity and loose grasp of the facts (she at one point referred to the “continent of Hawaii” and promised to send the video to the now-nonexistent Gawker).

But after posting his video mocking the woman, DeFranco noticed that his ad revenue for that video and others had been suspended.

YouTube withholds the right to block ad revenue for any video that is viewed to be “not advertiser-friendly.” DeFranco reports that his videos were being demonetized for “controversial or sensitive subjects.”

DeFranco later vented in a second video called “YouTube Is Shutting Down My Channel and I’m Not Sure What To Do.” “By taking away monetization, it is a form of censorship,” he argued. “Taking away the ability to monetize a video where you’re saying things that they don’t deem ‘okay,’ that’s been described as censorship with a different name. Because if you do this on the regular and you have no revenue, it’s not sustainable.”

[Image via screengrab]

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