Yesterday I wrote about the ongoing public battle between Vox’s Carlos Maza and Steven Crowder. Much to my surprise, YouTube told Maza last night that there was nothing in Crowder’s videos which violated its rules: “Our teams spent the last few days conducting an in-depth review of the videos flagged to us, and while we found language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted don’t violate our policies.”

Here is Maza’s initial response:

Gizmodo spoke with someone at YouTube who offered this additional information of the situation:

We take into consideration whether criticism is focused primarily on debating the opinions expressed or is solely malicious. We apply these policies consistently, regardless of how many views a video has.

In videos flagged to YouTube, Crowder has not instructed his viewers to harass Maza on YouTube or any other platform and the main point of these videos was not to harass or threaten, but rather to respond to the opinion.

There is certain behavior that is never ok: that includes encouraging viewers to harass others online and offline, or revealing nonpublic personal information (doxxing).

None of Maza’s personal information was ever revealed in content uploaded by Crowder and flagged to our teams for review.

That also didn’t sit well with Carlos Maza:

Last night it seemed that might be the end of it. The battle was over and Crowder had won. However, earlier today YouTube announced it would suspend Crowder’s monetization “because of a pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community.”

Carlos Maza was not satisfied with this and he complained once again about Crowder’s t-shirts.

Maza’s Vox co-worker German Lopez called it “worse than nothing”:

But others thought it was an absurd decision:

And then, before the sides could even settle in, YouTube clarified that the demonetization of Crowder’s channel was temporary. He would just have to remove a link to his t-shirts to get himself reinstated:

Maza was not happy:

To be fair, the t-shirts are one of the things that Maza has repeatedly complained about in the past few days including just a few hours ago (note the 2 examples above): “Crowder’s revenue stream isn’t from YouTube ads. It’s from selling merch and “Socialism Is For Fags” shirts to millions of loyal customers, that @YouTube continues to drive to his channel. For free.”

But if the demonetization of Crowder’s channel is temporary, it seems YouTube is demonetizing a lot of other channels today:

So it appears that Carlos Maza and Vox are having an impact even if it’s not exactly the one they intended. Crowder is promising a live update on the situation will begin soon. I’ll add the stream if it’s available.

Update: Here’s the Crowder live-stream.

Tags: carlos maza Steven Crowder YouTube