4 Years Ago, YouTube Went Full Commie

Never go full commie

As I write this, it is October 15th, 2024. I sit here reminiscing of the events that happened 4 years ago on Thursday October 15th 2020, the day a mass censorship campaign was waged by Big Tech that goes underreported and almost forgotten. This censorship campaign did not affect the larger “Conservative Inc.” crowd, so it doesn’t get talked about much - yet dozens, if not hundreds, of us citizen journalists on YouTube had our platforms wiped out within minutes of each other, totaling hundreds of millions of combined subscribers.

For some backstory of my old YouTube days, I had been posting videos on YouTube since January 2017, and I think by October 2020 I had posted some 8-900 videos garnering 30 million combined views, and my channel, Destroying the Illusion had around 250,000 subscribers (with a backup at 50K). I posted videos nearly everyday with political and news commentary and also reported on health topics and UFOs . An all around citizen investigation channel with a hint (or more) of conspiracy. In October 2017, Q began their online posts and I was the very first person on YouTube to discuss the subject - to which Destroying the Illusion exploded in popularity. YouTube videos and social media reporting (Twitter/Facebook) became my livelihood, my income, and my “career” (whatever that means). It was pivotal in getting me to where I’m at today, and was a huge turning point in my life.

Back to The Great Purge, or “Black Thursday” as I sometimes call it - it goes to note the day before this censorship wave was October 14th 2020, which was the day that the infamous Hunter Biden Laptop story was published by the New York Post. The establishment quickly went into ass covering mode calling it fake news, conspiracy theories, and “Russian Disinformation”. Twitter and Facebook both froze the ability to share the New York Post’s story on their platforms. And being just a few weeks before the 2020 election, the Deep State was in full panic election stealing mode.

This election stealing mode is what made Big Tech wage their mass censorship. At the time, there was a growing network of citizen journalists on YouTube who, combined, were getting more views than the mainstream media itself. I would average about 30,000 views per daily video, some channels were larger than mine with 50-60,000+ average views per video. Take 15 of our channels together and the combined daily views were more than a primetime CNN broadcast!

We were prime targets for the Deep State to silence in their information warfare.

October 15th rolls around and I receive an email at 9am in the morning letting me know that YouTube had suspended my channel. This was unprecedented, as normally they have a “3 strike” policy - get strikes on 3 videos and your channel is removed. My channel had no strikes.

YouTube’s notice they gave me when they banned Destroying the Illusion

I hop onto Twitter to share the news and see that Redpill78 also lost his channel. That’s when I got the feeling that something big was going down. Going onto YouTube to check some other channels like X22 Report, IPOT, Praying Medic, and others, all of their channels were taken down. I immediately hopped onto by backup channel, “Destroying the Illusion 2.0”, to report on this news. I was 20 minutes into livestream on this channel when the feed froze, my backup channel was taken down as I was live on it. All in all, dozens of channels were removed that day, possibly close to 100. Easily the worst day of mass censorship we have seen.

A running list I had made at the time of all the banned channels

Big Tech was primarily targeting the Q reporters. Coincidentally on October 15th, the House Intelligence Committee held an open hearing called “Misinformation, Conspiracy Theories, and ‘Infodemics’: Stopping the Spread Online” (led by Adam Schiff) with a focus on framing Q as dangerous and extremist - this hearing was going on at literally the exact same time that Big Tech started taking down all of our channels.

Labeling the Hunter Biden laptop as “Russian Disinformation” or “hacked material” was their springboard they used to censor the Q reporting YouTube channels.

Over the next week, I also had my Twitter account (215K followers), Facebook (100K) and Instagram (100K) profiles, Patreon account (700 subscibers), PayPal, Venmo, CashApp, Discord server, Mailchimp email account, and more account suspended I can’t even remember at this point.

It was brutal.

I lost a total of 700,000 combined followers on these platforms. My income went down by 40-50% overnight. Others lost far larger accounts than I did. This timeframe is when many of us began migrating to the alternative platforms (which we should have probably been preparing for earlier). I migrated my videos to Rumble, many of us went to Telegram as well. Parler was also big at the time, but it’s faded into oblivion since.

Black Thursday was a turning point in the global information war - in both negative and positive ways.

Negatively, Big Tech crossed the Rubicon with regards to censorship, which we now know due to “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” releases was at the behest of government actors and agencies. Many information consumers lost the standard channels they follow for “real” news. The dispersion of citizen journalists allowed shills and fakeMAGA/Q accounts to insert themselves into the online space. This timeframe, from late 2020 to early 2021, was when many of these clickbait shills came out of the woodwork.

Positively, this event showed millions of people how far the establishment would go to censor, and how desperate they are to control the narrative. This also helped the alternative media platforms rise in stature and being competing with the Big Tech monopoly. Rumble has come a long way over the last few years. The rise of the alternative media platforms also has helped small, America-First businesses who can’t afford running ads on YouTube or Facebook.

This mass censorship was a pain in the ass, but looking back it all worked out the way it should have - helping people wake up to censorship and also creating a niche for alternative platforms that DON’T censor. (I’m fairly surprised Substack, operating out of Silicon Valley, hasn’t seemed to censor anyone at all.)

& shout out to the O.G. Anons who have been here since the Destroying the Illusion days! Always heartwarming to hear from people who have been here since those times and remember them.

---

Thanks for reading.
Find ways to subscribe, share, and support below. 👇

Find me on:
Twitter » - Instagram » - Telegram » - Truth Social »

Videos on Rumble »

Support on Locals »
My health/supplement brand »
Other ways to help »

Website »
A link to all of my links »