James Desborough, the author for the recently released book Inside GamerGate, was set to partake in a live-stream interview on YouTube with content creator Giovanna Laine. However, YouTube preemptively censored the interview by striking Laine’s account with a community guideline violation… before the live-stream interview even took place.

Laine tweeted about the incident on August 19th, 2017, informing the community about the censorship and screen-capped YouTube’s automated response about the video being removed before the interview even took place.

What video? The stream wasn’t even scheduled to start for another 3 hours. What did they review? There was no video! #GamerGate pic.twitter.com/5i4tdegrcX — Giovanna Laine (@GiovannaLiviana) August 19, 2017

As noted in the tweet, the community strike was handed out three hours before the live-stream went live.

Laine believes this was part of YouTube’s automated algorithm, which was in response to a likelihood of mass reports being sent out from those who stand against #GamerGate, usually Social Justice Warriors.

SJWs, or Anti-#GamerGate activists have been consistently using censorship and de-platforming as a means of preventing the public from even learning about the event, other than what they want the public to know about it, such as the highly biased and evidence-deficient entry on Wikipedia. They also used these same tactics when #GamerGate organized an event at the Society of Professional Journalists’ Airplay event in Miami, Florida, where bomb threats were sent in to disrupt the event to prevent people from being able to talk about ethics in media journalism, as reported by Reason.

In the case of Laine, as you can see in the screenshots below.

Over on Laine’s YouTube Channel, the copyright status is good but the community guidelines status has dropped a notch due to the automatic flagging.

Some believe that Laine’s video was so easily flagged by the system and removed before the interview even took place due to Laine’s “political views”, which can be gathered by Google’s machine learning AI through tags, video descriptions, video titles, and comment sections (when applicable). If you look at Laine’s YouTube page you’ll notice that there are various videos about #GamerGate that don’t directly condemn it, as well as text descriptions that don’t align with Google’s preferred sociopolitical stance. In one video the description reads…

“CNN (Clinton News Network? Cosa Nostra Network?) has exposed their lack of journalistic ethics. The Main Stream Media (MSM) is corrupt. I recommend independent media like The Humanist Report, The Jimmy Dore Show, Empire Files with Abby Martin, etc.”

Descriptions like the one above could be used to flag Laine’s account. Many others have been reporting similar flags, sometimes even on innocuous content.

YouTube’s AI doesn’t just flag accounts based on what new material is added, but based on old videos, descriptions, titles, tags and comments as well; it’s an all-encompassing algorithm, which is why some YouTubers such as Raz0rFist automatically has his videos demonetized by YouTube, even if they do not breach any of YouTube’s content policy regulations.

Raz0rFist claimed that this was a form of a YouTube blacklist. Many other YouTubers have also been reporting identical situations happening to their accounts as well. A Google document was put together, containing a list of tentative keywords and tags that the AI has been using to flag accounts and add them to YouTube’s “blacklist”. If your account is added to that blacklist, it effectively means that content may automatically become ineligible for monetization.

This isn’t a policy or feature that has come out of left field, though. Google announced that they would be cracking down on “extremist” content on YouTube. Although, they used far less draconian terminology, calling it a Limited State content policy. The policy went into effect earlier this month, following a notice on August 8th, 2017.

In the case of Giovanna Laine, live-streams are no longer available and are restricted from being used on the account due to the community strike. So the live-stream interview with James Desborough is no longer possible for the time being. Nevertheless, Desborough’s Inside GamerGate book is still available for purchase as an e-book over on Amazon.