Dear YouTube, Why Are You Forcing Us To Talk Like Cartoon Characters?

YouTube, as you probably know, is a vast, glittering digital universe where you can find anything — from adorable cat videos to weird tutorials on how to knit sweaters for your pet tarantula. It’s also a place where creators try to make a living by monetizing their videos, which is a fancy way of saying “earning money for making stuff people watch instead of doing actual jobs like accounting or plumbing.”

But lately, YouTube has gone a little… well, nuts.

Specifically, YouTube has decided that if you say words like “rape,” “murder,” “suicide,” or “gun” in your video, you might upset the advertisers. And by “upset,” I mean the advertisers might have to (gasp!) clutch their pearls and faint dramatically onto a divan because the internet is apparently just too intense for them!

So what do creators do? Well, they bend over backwards to avoid “naughty” words by inventing a bizarre new baby-talk language where terrible things are described using terms so soft and ridiculous they sound like they came from a preschool classroom.

For example:

Rape becomes SA (short for “sexual assault”), which sounds more like a vitamin supplement or maybe a student loan application.
Gun becomes pew-pew, which sounds more like a dirty diaper than a gun.
Murder becomes unalived, which sounds like something a medieval wizard says after casting a spell: “BEGONE, KNAVE! YOU ARE UNALIVED!”
Suicide becomes self-deleted, which, let’s be honest, makes it sound like you’re talking about closing your Twitter account or a toddler’s naptime, not an actual suicide.

Now, you might ask: Why?

Because YouTube’s magical advertising robots scan videos for “bad words” and demonetize them faster than you can say “crime scene.” This means if you run a true crime channel (such as myself) or talk about any serious, real-world topic (such as myself), you’re forced to tiptoe around reality like a Victorian lady avoiding eye contact at a brothel. Brothel – that’ll probably get me demonetized too.

Imagine trying to explain a murder case like this:

“In 1998, the suspect allegedly unalived his wife after she confronted him about SA allegations, before he self-deleted in what police called a permanent sleep incident.”

What?!

If aliens intercepted our YouTube videos, they’d think we were a species too emotionally fragile to handle our own language. They’d probably send back a message like:

“Hello Earth. We are confused. Please clarify: Did your population unalive or simply log off? Should we send condolences or reboot your planet?”

The truly bonkers part here? The content doesn’t change. You can talk in explicit, horrifying detail about death and violence, but as long as you replace the words with something fluffy and vague, YouTube’s money faucet stays on.

This is the digital equivalent of a kid covering his eyes during a scary movie and saying, “If I can’t see the monster, it can’t hurt me!”

Meanwhile, the YouTube advertisers who supposedly care about “safe” content have no problem whatsoever throwing ads on videos with conspiracy theories, political rage, or someone drinking motor oil as a challenge, because those are apparently… fine? But heaven help you if you tell the truth and use the actual word for what happened.

At this point, we’re probably one step away from people saying things like:

“He was permanently inconvenienced by sharp object interaction.”
“She entered an advanced state of horizontal relaxation.”
“He performed unauthorized financial redistribution with extreme prejudice.”

Look, YouTube: we’re adults. We know the world has hard topics. Trying to police the words instead of the content is like putting a Band-Aid on a chainsaw wound. Nobody’s fooled, and we all look ridiculous.

So please, let’s drop the baby talk. Bring back real words. Give creators the freedom to say “rape,” “murder,” “suicide,” and all the hard terms they need to tell real stories — without losing their ad revenue.

Otherwise, the rest of us are going to have to keep watching YouTube videos that sound like they were scripted by Care Bears. And honestly? That’s just self-deletingly annoying. And makes me want to unalive somebody.