For the past few years, I’ve been trying to make videos on history. I tried uploading to YouTube, and the video I made talking about racism in silent film got flagged for being racist.

I tried uploading to TikTok. The first account I had there was one about the 2000s. I at least understood when the account got flagged, because it did include a lot of videos about movies and music. I was annoyed, but I did get it even though there were thousands of other accounts posting the same nostalgia content.

I switched over to history. The first one I got was for a video I had reposted on some current event things regarding Gaza. Others were videos I had reposted on immigration protests.

It was the kind of content I had always reposted.

I posted a video on the history of John D. Rockefeller with a clip from the early 1900s of him talking about his hopes and dreams for America. That got a community violation. Apparently, it was copyrighted.

Which is weird, because I’ve used clips from the same video company, Pathe, in my other videos too. The normal thing to do would be to keep trying content but I’m frustrated.

I can’t get any views but there’s people out there who do nothing but show clothes or sell products that don’t label their videos correctly that don’t get community violations and get millions of views in turn. There are people that are out there spreading hate and they also don’t get community violations.

It doesn’t feel like the community violations are actually being used to police those who need policing. It feels like censorship. I was posting about women’s history, black history, and American history in general. I tried to be respectful when having my conversations.

Yet, because I wasn’t an asshole with a microphone that was making them money, my stuff kept getting hit. This wasn’t about the money for me. I liked making the videos. I had originally planned on moving to Spotify, but I’m not a big fan of their current business practices right now like investing in AI warefare and playing advertisements for ICE.

I’m not trying to say I deserved followers because of the content I was making or anything like that. But it would have been nice to at least been given a chance to make serious content when I know there are other people out there that do because I follow them.

The internet doesn’t want you to learn though. It wants you dumb and complacent.