In his March 15 daily livestream, Adams announced that YouTube informed him that two of his January videos “promoted false election claims” and were removed. As far as he could tell, the videos did no such thing, though YouTube, per its common practice, didn’t reveal what specifically Adams said that irked its censors.
“I don’t even have a guess why I got censored,” he stated.
Normally, an alleged policy violation results in a “strike” and if three accumulate, the whole channel gets erased. For many a YouTube personality, that’s nearly a career kill. In this instance, though, YouTube spared Adams the penalty.
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“They’re saying we’re not going to give you a strike because you probably didn’t know you did anything wrong. But what happens the next time?” he asked.
“Then next time, can they not say, ‘We warned you’? I feel like they could, because they did warn me but they didn’t tell me what it was that I did. So I don’t have the option of avoiding it because I don’t know what it was. Now, do you see what’s happening? … Doesn’t that look like a setup to you?”
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Adams’s case is part of a pattern that seems designed to induce self-censorship. Tech companies tend to make their content rules vague, keep part of them secret, and not notify users what precisely they did wrong. The outcome is that people try to guess the boundaries of the censorship themselves and are expected to cage themselves more tightly than the rules would require.
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Adams is remembered to comment on news and politics from a mix of liberal and conservative perspectives. A trained hypnotist, his specialty is pinpointing and decoding persuasion methods, demonstrating how to use them as well as avoid being affected by them.
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He explained that it looks like YouTube is already choking his channel as “the monetization, everything for the channel just plunged.”
“I feel as if they’re pushing me to the situation where I will accidentally cancel myself and I’ll never know I did it. I’ll just be cancelled,” he said.
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The deleted videos are his Jan. 3 live stream titled, “Episode 1240 Scott Adams: My Impression of Mayor Ted Wheeler Negotiating, China Bad, Election Audit,” and his Jan. 6 livestream titled, “Episode 1243 Scott Adams: Georgia Election Credibility and Where Do We Go From Here?”
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