YouTube partially demonetizes Benjamin Boyce

Benjamin Boyce is an Evergreen State College graduate who became one of the school’s most outspoken critics after the campus was taken over by radicals in 2017. Since then, Boyce has produced more than 90 videos talking about various Evergreen related topics. I’ve posted at least half a dozen of those videos here on Hot Air starting back in July 2017 and continuing to as recently as last month. Because he has multiple sources feeding him information, Boyce continues to be the go-to guy for information on the school much of which never appears anywhere else. However, he also covers other topics and does interviews with people about things that have nothing to do with Evergreen.

Tuesday, Boyce noticed that dozens of his videos had been put into a partially demonetized state. He scrolled through a list in a video posted to Twitter. All of the videos with a yellow dollar sign have been put into the partially demonetized state, which means they can only show ads from advertisers willing to appear before controversial content.

Sudden mass demonetization of my @YouTube channel. Yay. pic.twitter.com/qhUQcgV8jc

— Benjamin Boyce (@BenjaminABoyce) June 18, 2019

He took it with his usual offbeat sense of humor:

“The Borg giveth, and the Borg taketh away.” –The Vox of the Derppostles, 21:19

— Benjamin Boyce (@BenjaminABoyce) June 18, 2019

Update: about 40 vids from the last 6 months were suddenly switched from full to limited monetization at the same time yesterday. My channel has been "escalated" to @YouTube's "Internal team" for review. We'll see what's what in a couple days. Thanks everyone for the support!!! https://t.co/rRqwZqqQ8b

— Benjamin Boyce (@BenjaminABoyce) June 19, 2019

Boyce spoke to the College Fix about the situation and said he was working with YouTube to address it, but he still had no idea what had caused it:

Late Wednesday, Boyce told The College Fix that YouTube is “now manually going through my appeals and deciding which are suitable and which are not. So far, it’s about 50/50.”

Boyce said he does not know if it was his Evergreen videos that prompted some sort of complaint to spark the sudden mass demonetization or something else.

Another controversial topic he has covered includes transgender detransitions and similar issues surrounding sexuality and gender.

Boyce, a self-described “centrist,” also takes on topics such as cultural Marxism and censorship, interviews guests on a variety of subjects, and offers viewers his own brand of irreverent comedy. His channel has 27,000 subscribers.

Today, Boyce posted a video about the situation. He still doesn’t know if his content was flagged by someone at Evergreen or if this was part of a larger clampdown at YouTube. What’s odd is that Boyce is the opposite of a flamethrower. His content is generally thoughtful and attempts to be even-handed. Much of the material he’s produced on Evergeen State is really niche reporting based on documents and video clips others don’t have access to. I find it very odd that he would suddenly have set off YouTube’s “controversial producer” radar with clips like “Humor and Humanity.”

Boyce said he’s not terribly worried about losing the small amount of revenue but he discovered something else that does bother him. If you type “Evergreen College” into Google’s video search his videos never show up (not in 21 pages worth of results anyway). So it seems that marking his videos as controversial may have also served to remove them from search.

YouTube needs to explain how any of Boyce’s videos violate the rules. As of now, it seems whoever flagged his videos has succeeded in effectively hiding his content on Google.