Our theme for the month of March is “I was wrong about.”

I don’t want to tell you how much time I spend on YouTube. It’s embarrassing, so suffice to say that I spend enough time there to be generally well-versed in the platform’s tics and idiosyncrasies. I know why most videos are at least eight minutes long, why that one you saw earlier now has a different title, and why your favorite creator has a second channel that they post on twice as much as the main one. I know who MrBeast is and why he’s writing a book with James Patterson, even though that Venn diagram has zero overlap in audience.

I know that there’s certain music you can’t play in your video and what will happen if you include too many clips of a TV show when you’re reviewing it. I also know that there are certain things that you can’t say.

What I didn’t know, until recently, was that I’d stopped saying certain things, too.

We’re used to hearing swear words bleeped out, so that one didn’t affect my vocabulary. It only dawned that anything had happened to me when I realized that I no longer used the word “rape.”

More accurately, I realized that something had changed when I heard someone else say it and felt myself reacting in the same way that I might if someone used a racial slur. A pause. An increase in heart rate. An internal “did they just say…?”

Of course, “rape” is not a slur. It is a powerful word, and one that deserves consideration and judicious application. You may find yourself euphemizing away from it for many reasons, including tact and care and thoughtfulness. And having a reaction to its use may also be appropriate, depending on context and personal experience.

But my response wasn’t about any of that. It was because YouTube had subconsciously taught me that “rape” was a dirty word.

It will hardly surprise you to learn that the root of this is money.

Being a free platform, YouTube is almost entirely reliant on advertiser revenue to turn a profit. This means that they are forever fixed between the irreconcilable axes of “good for users” and “good for advertisers.” And when those two things are irrevocably opposed, YouTube will always side with the advertisers.

We can trace the current state of affairs back to 2018, when Logan Paul uploaded a video that featured the body of a suicide victim. Advertisers, rightly worried about their brand being associated with something so vile, fled the platform. YouTube’s bid to claw them back involved tightening its content restrictions seemingly ad infinitum (one more thing we can all hate Logan Paul for).

Content creators, now stuck with a choice between self-censorship and making a living, overwhelmingly and understandably chose the former. In addition to necessitating the tiptoeing around “sensitive” or “controversial” topics, YouTubers created a lexicon of near-misses in an attempt to foil the algorithm. “Unalive” for suicide. “PDF file” for pedophile. And (particularlly heinous, in my opinion) “grape” for rape.

How can we be expected to take a topic seriously when it is being referred to in the internet’s version of rhyming slang?

Much written text and many video titles suffered a similar fate, asterisks appearing in words that it would have been ludicrous to censor ten years ago. Of these, “d*e” for the word “die” strikes me as the most ridiculous and incomprehensible.

But if you are a content creator whose income is dependent on remaining monetized, it’s not ridiculous; it’s necessary. YouTube is no longer the domain of cat videos and get ready with mes. It has not been that for years. It is the second most-visited website on the internet. It has no meaningful competitors. And it is where vast swaths of the population get their information about everything from cryptocurrency to current events to how to replace the battery in the key fob of their 2017 Ford Focus.

YouTube creators understand that they are hamstrung by this. That, if they speak about controversial topics—no matter how relevant to their audiences—or use certain words—no matter how appropriate they are in context–they will lose money and their content will be hidden by an inscrutable algorithm. Some rebel, either with videos on the topic itself or by releasing unredacted cuts of their projects on Patreon or other platforms. At least one creator I watch starts every video with the phrase “this video has been censored to comply with YouTube ad policy.”

The danger to independent journalism and creative expression seems clear. The damage to viewers is less so.

How many people are, like I was, being silently trained by their favorite YouTube personalities that serious topics are not to be spoken of? That even when they are discussed, the most straightforward and useful language is to be avoided? It would be Orwellian if the motivation was not so banal.

The librarian in me wants to say that media literacy is the answer. The optimist wants to believe that alternate platforms could someday encroach on YouTube’s monopoly. The cynic would point out that YouTube sure seems to have an awful lot of AI-slop ads for scams on its website for a company that claims to care about brand integrity.

The whole of me—who loves YouTube videos, by the way—knows that any solution will not be abstinence-only. I suspect it will boil down to paying creators, not companies. And, in the meantime, it will be to pay attention to what people are saying and why. To pay attention to what we are saying and why. To, ultimately, give our words no less power than they deserve, and no more.

Annaka Koster

Annaka Koster (’18) graduated from Calvin with majors in English and history and the University of Michigan a couple years later as a “master” of information science. She’s now a public librarian in her hometown. Outside the library, Annaka can be found doing a sundry of nerdy things, including reading comics, playing board games, and mourning her pet snail, Clive.