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Saladin was ethnically Kurdish, so I wonder if someone of Arab, Persian, or Turkish (or whatever other groups might have a historical beef with the Kurds) desce

Saladin was ethnically Kurdish, so I wonder if someone of Arab, Persian, or Turkish (or whatever other groups might have a historical beef with the Kurds) descent works at Youtube has an axe to grind. Or maybe the Crusades are considered a touchy subject by someone at Youtube? Stuff like this has happened before, I remember a year or two ago on Twitter there was someone who was friends with someone on the moderation team at Twitter and got them to shut down anyone tweeting anything negative about them, I can't remember the details at the moment. Or years ago on Reddit you couldn't criticize a certain moderator that had a friend who was an admin for the site.

avar 6y ago
> Or maybe the Crusades are considered a touchy subject by someone at Youtube? Or more plausibly and less conspiracy-esque, a company like YouTube will eventually come up with a formula like: threshold=1.5 if hassle(topic) / threshold > revenue(topic): ban(topic) I.e. maybe they don't care at all about the subject, but dealing with reported videos, comments, the PR impact from flamewars about a contentious subject etc. just isn't worth it. All for a topic that's hard to monetize, easier just to ban it and move on.
notsureaboutpg 6y ago
Hahahaha, way off base. Saladin is revered by khilafist Muslims who wish to reunite the Muslim world under one Islamic government. There's a lot of overlap between this group and groups proscribed by the US government. Guarantee most Muslims have no idea that Saladin was ethnically Kurdish or think that that matters. Most Muslims don't even know anyone Kurdish or care about Kurds. The Kurdish story is really only told much in the West because they were allies with the West in all the last two decades' wars. I'll bet the house that YouTube noticed lots of channels promoting Saladin are also heavily populated with videos praising groups with similar aims as Saladin but which are proscribed by the US govt (don't wanna say names for obvious reasons)

avar 6y ago

> Or maybe the Crusades are considered a touchy subject by someone at Youtube? Or more plausibly and less conspiracy-esque, a company like YouTube will eventually come up with a formula like: threshold=1.5 if hassle(topic) / threshold > revenue(topic): ban(topic) I.e. maybe they don't care at all about the subject, but dealing with reported videos, comments, the PR impact from flamewars about a contentious subject etc. just isn't worth it. All for a topic that's hard to monetize, easier just to ban it and move on.

notsureaboutpg 6y ago

Hahahaha, way off base. Saladin is revered by khilafist Muslims who wish to reunite the Muslim world under one Islamic government. There's a lot of overlap between this group and groups proscribed by the US government. Guarantee most Muslims have no idea that Saladin was ethnically Kurdish or think that that matters. Most Muslims don't even know anyone Kurdish or care about Kurds. The Kurdish story is really only told much in the West because they were allies with the West in all the last two decades' wars. I'll bet the house that YouTube noticed lots of channels promoting Saladin are also heavily populated with videos praising groups with similar aims as Saladin but which are proscribed by the US govt (don't wanna say names for obvious reasons)