YouTube’s new profanity rules are punishing creators retroactively, and they’re furious

An image of SungWon Cho holding a piece of paper in front of his face reading


YouTube’s been cracking down on swearing lately, in its enduring quest to give itself the same general vibe as dinner at your grandparents’ house, and hardly anyone is happy about it. Rules from November (opens in new tab) (via Kotaku (opens in new tab)) last year are demonetising videos that use profanity in their title, thumbnail, their first seven seconds, or “consistently throughout the video,” whatever that means. It’s impacting streamers who play mature games and, incomprehensibly, even affecting videos that were uploaded before the rules were announced.

Making things even dicier for content creators on the platform, YouTube has now decided to treat all curse words as basically equivalent. Whether you’re howling the F-word or muttering a humble ‘ass,’ YouTube promises to come down on you regardless. On the plus side, ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ are no longer considered profanity according to YouTube’s arcane laws.



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