YouTube’s War on History
YouTube’s aggressive moves against hate speech are hitting genuine, high quality educational content in the crossfire by removing monetisation opportunities.
“Just today, we learned that over 250 of our videos had been retroactively demonetised without notice. These arbitrary rules can change any day and can be applied at will to existing content, it seems History is not welcome on these platforms anymore.”
Florian Wittig, CEO at Real Time History.
Real Time History is responding to YouTube’s current policies by asking their community for support either through crowdfunding and Patreon.
“Archive footage we use depicts historical scenes from humanity’s darkest days and as such feature iconography that is frowned upon on the by advertisers and platforms like Facebook and YouTube. There’s no regard given to the context and that we are an educational channel teaching history and have been doing that for more than five years now!”
Real Time History has also teamed up with several high profile history YouTubers with a collective reach of 3M, and the film will be made available on their platform in April 2020, 75 years after the Battle of Berlin took place.
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Notes to Editors
Founded in 2019, Real Time History GmBH is the production company behind the popular YouTube Channel, The Great War. The channel retells the events of WW1 in real-time 100 years after they took place and has over 1 million subscribers, and has achieved almost 200 million views.
Demonetisation
Youtube rarely ’takes down’ videos, instead they demonetise them which means they won’t get recommended to viewers or be eligible for advertising revenue — essentially this has the same effect as taking them down.
16 Days In Berlin is currently crowdfunding at Indiegogo: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/documentary-16-days-in-berlin/
For more information and interviews, contact:
Dan Morelle
