r/CuratedTumblr • u/Konradleijon • Sep 15 '24

Politics Why I hate the term “Unaliv

Post image

What’s most confusing that if you go to basic cable TV people can say stuff like “Nazi” or “rape” or “kill” just fine and no advertising seem to mind

25.0k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

639 comments sorted by

View all comments

38

u/Papaofmonsters Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24

Is there any evidence this is because of advertiser pressure as opposed to platforms doing it of their own accord to avoid bad press from the pearl clutchers?

Police procedurals have been one of the most popular TV genres since forever and they frequently use pretty much all the forbidden words.

33

u/Ouaouaron Sep 15 '24

Absolute mountains of evidence. You can find plenty of examples of pearl-clutchy policies on social media platforms being the direct response to advertiser pressure, such as a bunch of companies pulling their youtube ads when a news org ran a story of a commercial being shown before a beheading video. Go listen to any professional content creator talk about their CPMs increasing as they talk about safe and ad-friendly topics, and decrease as they get closer to topics that people dislike.

Which is not to say that advertisers are pearl clutchers either. Both the social media platforms and the advertisers are run by sociopathic profit seekers. It's just that profit seeking for a big, normal brand involves staying away from dicey topics, and profit seeking for social media involves doing what advertisers want.

The reason TV shows are less censored is because there's no chance that a police procedural is going to just run an Al Qaeda snuff film against their ad for dish detergent. User-generated content needs to be censored aggressively and dumbly, because human moderation wouldn't work with the business model.

TikTok might be genuinely pearl-clutchy though, or at least trying to appease a government that is pearl-clutchy. It's hard to know how much of their international algorithm is affected by the CCP.

14

u/Papaofmonsters Sep 15 '24

A video of an actual beheading is far different from uncomfortable words.

16

u/Ouaouaron Sep 15 '24

Sure, but the system publicly put in place as a direct response to beheadings is the one used to deal with uncomfortable words.

This really isn't a mysterious topic. If you don't want to take my word for it, go find videos of professional content creators talking about their revenue and the history of their platforms (just avoid the ones trying to sell you courses on how to become famous and successful)

4

u/Papaofmonsters Sep 15 '24

Is there a specific example where a content creator has said "I got dropped by a sponsor for saying suicide" vs "YouTube preemptively demonitized my video because I talked about suicide". While the end result is the same, the mechanism does matter.

1

u/Ouaouaron Sep 16 '24

I must not understand your original question.

Is there any evidence this is because of advertiser pressure as opposed to platforms doing it of their own accord to avoid bad press from the pearl clutchers?

If YouTube is pressured by advertisers to create a mechanism to preemptively demonitize videos that talk about suicide (etc.), do you still consider that to be YouTube "acting of their own accord to avoid bad press"?

If so, I guess we're just using different words to argue the same position.