Why YouTube Deleted My 1m Subscriber Channel - Stefan Molyneux - #195

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Stefan Molyneux, and he is the ex-owner of one of the biggest philosophy channels on all of YouTube. Last week, he got banned, and that was nearly a million subscribers, couple of hundred million views, couple of billion comments, and that was deleted overnight. And I wanted to just find out what was going on. Stefan has an interesting insight into the current political landscape in both America and more broadly. We get into some discussions to do with welfare states, personal sovereignty, personal agency, and a bunch of other stuff. As we move further into 2020 and issues of freedom of expression and freedom of speech online become more and more important, I thought it would be a good idea to hear from the second largest ever YouTube deletion after Alex Jones. So yeah, tons of insights to take away from today. But for now, please give it up for Stefan Molyneux.
Stefan, this is a welcome return to YouTube for you. Welcome back to YouTube.

**Stefan Molyneux** (1:17)
Oh, wait, I feel I should be incognito. Let me try another accent. Yes, I guess I'm treading the dark halls of those who no longer wish to grace their platform with my presence. So, hi.

**Chris Williamson** (1:32)
Hi, mate. This is a Trojan horse. We've delivered you in the guise of someone else, and now you're back on. So, tell us what's happened.

**Stefan Molyneux** (1:39)
And that's weird, too, because I'm currently wearing a Trojan. Anyway, never mind. Go on.

**Chris Williamson** (1:43)
Nice. Tell us what's happened over the last week.

**Stefan Molyneux** (1:47)
Well, so, there's been sort of a successive de-platforming-ish kind of stuff that's been going on with me on YouTube. It goes back to a year ago, February, right after I criticized censorship at the European Union.
I ended up being vanished out of, I think, suggested videos, promoted videos. They took my most popular video, the story of your enslavement, and made it like adult content, so it couldn't show up in the searches, and you had to be logged in and all that. And that cut traffic quite a bit. I'm the kind of guy-

**Chris Williamson** (2:22)
Going to there, what did you say? You just criticized- Yeah.

**Stefan Molyneux** (2:27)
I was just criticizing the sort of ongoing censorship issues that were occurring on social media platforms. This was in a speech I gave in Brussels at the European Union, and probably coincidentally, but right after that, they didn't seem to be such a fan. And look, that's a real challenge. That is a real challenge, which is how much do online platforms allow for criticism of online platforms? I mean, if it's your baby, you kind of take it personally, so that's a real challenge. So I got vanished, as I said, from suggested videos and so on. But I'm the kind of guy, I do well when cornered. I guess you could refer to me as a rat, you know? So when I'm kind of up against the wall, I mean, it's funny, because I don't want to say I do my best work, like I'm not always trying to do my best work, but suddenly when you're in a corner, you really do summon additional resources you didn't know that you had. And so my views went down significantly, like 80 percent, but I kind of managed to wrestle them back up over time. And then the next big issue was in September of last year, I went to Hong Kong and I did a documentary march with the protesters, took face full after face full of tear gas, stood and stared down the fascist barrels of the proto-communist security police out there and did a very long detailed and brutal history of China and its illegitimate claims on certain aspects of Hong Kong. And boy, you put that out, and you know, the old philosophical question, if a tree falls in the forest, but no one hears, did it actually fall, or did it make a sound? Well, you put out a video and you put the exact title and you can't find it. And so I think that was another big issue. Then shortly after that, I vanished from the autocomplete. As you type my name in, my name is like, it's like the Welsh nickname for an Aztec god, as far as spelling goes, as you probably know. So that made it progressively harder. Then I sort of heard rumors that even video titles of mine were vanishing and all of that. And then on Monday, but my account was in good standing. I didn't have any issues or strikes or problems or anything like that. But then Monday, I got a message saying, I can't find you on YouTube. And I thought it was just people saying, like the type of head thing, the autocomplete wasn't working. But yeah, I logged in to my channel and well, there was nothing there. Just a message that says, you've been a bad thinking guy and your 14 or 15 year history, 3,700 videos and billions of comments, 300 million views plus almost a million subscribers. Oh, and that was another thing too. Like I used to be getting 10,000 new subscribers a month.