This is what those worried about a YouTube purge should be worrying about rather than the new terms of service:
YouTube will no longer allow videos that “maliciously insult someone” based on “protected attributes” such as race, gender identity or sexuality. The video-sharing platform will also ban “implied threats of violence” as part of its new harassment policy.
A row erupted in June after a prominent video-maker said he had been the target of abuse by another YouTube star. At the time, YouTube said its rules had not been broken. But it has now deleted many of the videos in question.
“Even if a single video doesn’t cross the line, with our new harassment policy we can take a pattern of behaviour into account for enforcement,” Neal Mohan, chief product officer at YouTube, told the BBC.
Then again, it doesn’t really matter because there are no actual rules to which anyone, much less a banned creator, can hold YouTube accountable or any authority to which one can appeal. This means that YouTube will do whatever it wants right up until the moment that it finds suddenly itself paying out tens of millions of dollars in the inevitable class action lawsuit.
We’re not dealing with great legal minds here. Notice how everything is veiled in subjectives; they can’t simply ban insults because doing so would be relatively easy to objectively observe. Is it an insult, Y/N? So, in order to allow selective enforcement, they ban “malicious” insults depending upon whatever motivation their mindreaders determine applies. Or difficult-to-define things such as implications and patterns of behavior.