Conservative YouTube Channels are Being Buried

Have you recently tried to watch your favorite conservative YouTuber, only to find that the only videos popping up in your search for miles are 3-subscriber randoms commenting on some offensive thing they probably took out of context?

If you’ve experienced this, chances are you aren't alone on this matter.

Steven Crowder, famous for the “Change My Mind” skit, where he invites college students to challenge his position on a heavy subject, such as abortion, or male privilege has Crowder has accrued more than 4 million subscribers, making him the largest conservative channel on the platform. Knowing this, there should be no issue searching for his videos.

However, in a recent video, Crowder made light that if you were to search “Steven Crowder Change My Mind,” it takes at least a full page of videos to find one from his channel.

Disturbingly, his isn’t the only channel to be plagued with this issue. Other conservative voices such as Live Action, Paul Joseph Watson, and Lauren Chen have also been hidden from their search engine.

To be clear, if you search for any of these YouTubers, their channel will come up, as will their latest videos, but the search engine will bury specific videos you are trying to find.

You may be starting to wonder if this applies to all channels now, but it clearly doesn’t. If you were to search videos for non-political or Left-wing YouTubers such as Pewdiepie or Buzzfeed, the vast majority of results from the search engine will pull videos directly from their channel.

Even more interestingly, this phenomenon (or oppression, whatever you want to call it) only appears to apply to American viewers. Commenters who claim to be from other countries have noted that they have no problem finding Crowder’s videos, until they set their VPN to an American location.

Google has made it abundantly clear that they plan to oppose Trump in any way they can, and turn the tide against him in the next election. The result of this seems to be an attempt to block opposing opinions from reaching the voter base, so that less-informed Americans only receive information Google wants them to hear.

Of course, employees of Alphabet (the parent company of Google and YouTube) have argued that there is no deliberate bias against conservatives, that search results simply come from algorithms that prefer popularity, but if that was true, Crowder’s videos should take precedence over the commentary videos with 5.7k views that are consistently earning the top search results. Not to mention, algorithms have an inherent bias when they’re made, since they’re created by humans, who have an inherent bias.

Technically, YouTube is a private business that is allowed to ban or censor or silence whomever it desires, but the problem is that YouTube fancies itself as a platform for all voices, but if they’re demonetizing and burying voices they clearly don’t want people to hear, they have no business referring to themselves as a platform at all, and channels like Steven Crowder have every prerogative to seek legal action for false advertising, if nothing else.