“All media” is a huge stretch.. legacy hyper regulated media maybe

YouTube recently introduced an AI-driven policy that automatically places suspected under-18 accounts into Restricted Mode, which blocks access to political and news content. This happens because lots of people are sharing accounts with their kids and despite Youtubers attempts to change this there are large amount of viewers who actually dont subscribe to channels. This change has already caused independent creators to lose 25–33% of their views, since many users get flagged and no longer see political videos recommended. This has happened once before during the 2017–2018 "Adpocalypse": when all political channels lost ad revenue after advertisers pulled out due to seeing their content on a few extremist channels. The motivation now seems to be brand safety and political sensitivity, but the effect is the same: fewer viewers, less revenue, and potential long-term harm to independent media. Its the first step towards pushing out independent creators. Yeah there is substack and patreon but many avenues of independent media are in danger and this is a step in the wrong direction.

> places suspected under-18 accounts into Restricted Mode, which blocks access to political and news content

Debates about the quality of this sort of content aside, wow, that's just what we need, a generation of new adults who have no idea what's going on...

>YouTube recently introduced an AI-driven policy that automatically places suspected under-18 accounts into Restricted Mode

This is blatantly false. This was a single youtube channel's mistaken belief

It was incorrect. Restricted Mode is completely unrelated to the issue, and plenty of the videos that are doing just fine are not available if you have restricted mode on.

There's still no definitive answer IMO, but it might be that an analytics endpoint was blocked by ad blockers.

Note that the people affected by this problem say they are getting the same revenue, just view counts changed. That means their videos are getting the same number of not-adblocked views.

Why would you expect Substack and Patreon to be any better ?

They are platforms too, and US-based too, and IIRC Patreon has already been caught at least twice engaging in censorship : against some right-wingers, and some porn.

(They are at least less able to manipulate speech through recommendations I guess...)