The censorship across the YouTube comment sections on various YouTube channels has escalated. Chinese expat and YouTube content creator, Matthew “laowhy86” Tye, has had all of the comments across every single one of this videos disabled.

In a video posted up on February 27th, 2019, Tye explained to his audience that they can no longer comment on any of his videos. He wasn’t notified by YouTube that they disabled his comments, and he’s unable to do anything about it for now. He did reach out to the Google Support staff who explained to him why they disabled the comments and what their next steps are, which you can check out in the video below from the laowhy86 channel.

If you don’t want to watch all eight minutes and 35 seconds to get to the part where the Google Support staff explains the situation to Tye, the relevant part from Elaine Grace reads…

“We are always looking at ways to better protect families on YouTube. When we find opportunities to improve viewer safety – and we’re confident of that benefit after running detailed experiments – we go forward with the change. We’d like for everyone on YouTube to benefit, however, for a short time some partners will benefit, some will be impacted negatively, and others will be unaffected. We investigated the issue and it’s working as intended.”

Tye acknowledges that this will likely impact his income for the time being, and is relying a lot on Patreon at the moment.

Worse yet is that before he contacted the Google Support staff about the problem, he first found out about the comments being disabled by one of his subscribers.

At around the 5:20 mark Tye explains…

“YouTube not only didn’t let me know, they basically left me in a position where I wasn’t even able to look any information about this, because they told no one. This just started randomly happening. So about two or three hours ago I noticed the last and final comment on my channel, and everything after that was disabled.”

This has been a systematic approach by YouTube, first by disabling comments on channels that cater towards kids, like Chadtronic, and then allowing the algorithm to completely wipe out channels that hosted videos with ‘CP’ in the title as part of a crackdown on “child exploitation”. However, the people over at Kotaku in Action believe that this was more politically motivated due to Tye’s increasing amount of criticism of the Chinese government in his videos, since he and his family live in China.

There’s no proof that YouTube disabled the comments due to his criticisms of the Chinese government, but as he points out in his video above, his content was not aimed at kids, nor were his two daughters featured prominently in any of his content.

His wife’s channel also had all of its comments disabled as well, with no ETA on when they might be re-enabled.

YouTube was courtesy enough to tell Chadtronic that they were working on a solution to fix the issue and protect families and kids, but didn’t reveal what the solution would be or when it would be made available.

For now, if you want to comment on the laowhy86 channel you’ll need to grab the Dissenter comment extension from the official Dissenter website.

(Thanks for the news tip KIA)