Gun Content Producers Are Finally Leaving YouTube

Perhaps for the first time, even though their tone is all wrong, The Daily Beast (to which I’m not linking) may have gotten something right: “Guntubers” are leaving YouTube. Finally. Maybe.

It isn’t easy. Once a platform like YouTube hits critical mass, it’s extremely hard to get eyeballs on your content elsewhere. If all the gun content moves to Rumble (and it should) that’s fine. If only a few guys jump ship, it comes at a huge cost to them, as the mass of viewers and all of their views will continue consuming whoever’s on YouTube.

For the creators, views are revenue. To produce content good enough to make a living off it you effectively have to do it full-time. Prepping, shooting, and editing regular video content is labor-intensive. But a full-time job requires a full-time salary, and the revenue simply isn’t there if your videos exist in a space where viewers don’t.

The biggest issue with YouTube’s “community guidelines” around firearm content is that it’s (if you’ll excuse the pun) a moving target for the creators. YouTube’s rules are intentionally vague, making it effectively impossible to know what is and is not acceptable if there’s a firearm in your video. Worse, YouTube is constantly reinterpreting its own policies and then applying new “rulings” retroactively.

For instance, I received “strikes” and lost the right to monetize my channel with YouTube-served ads due to a change in YouTube policy that applied not only to newly-created videos, but retroactively to all existing videos. In this specific case, it was an out-of-nowhere decision by YouTube that they don’t allow videos that show the act of attaching a suppressor to a firearm. At the time I had 150-or-so videos on the platform and a huge portion of them featured suppressed shooting. Which ones showed me attaching the suppressor to the gun?

While I had no way to review hundreds of hours of video content in an attempt to find ones in violation of this new policy and then, presumably, delete them in order to maintain compliance, YouTube’s AI system and army of anti-gun snitches who flag videos for policy violations had no problem sniffing them out quickly and applying a strike to my account for each one.

This behavior of moving the goal posts by suddenly interpreting and enforcing overly broad, punitively vague policy guidelines in new ways without warning and then applying it to all existing content is malicious. No communication occurs until the creator opens up their YouTube studio and sees guideline violation notifications, account strikes, and/or deleted content notifications.

This malicious behavior by YouTube against gun content creators has increased over the last couple of years, not decreased. We all received violation warnings as YouTube auto-deleted content last week as part of a sudden, massive crackdown of lord-knows-what.

Following this widespread campaign to limit what gun content creators can say or show even further, Daily Beast was correct to report that a lot more guntubers have made the decision to leave the platform. Enough is becoming enough. Is it bad enough yet? Yes, for more of us than ever it is, in fact, bad enough.

But we ALL need to leave. Guntubers staying on YouTube hurt the Guntubers with the testicular fortitude to leave. Shooting News Weekly just created our Rumble channel HERE and we’ll start populating it with videos this week! Please subscribe to us on there, and please encourage every other gun-related video content creator you watch to jump ship from YouTube to Rumble.