Because sooner or later, YouTube is going to get rid of every single YouTuber who contradicts the Narrative.
YouTube has removed the 2-million-subscriber account of exiled Ukrainian Journalist of the Year Diana Panchenko, a fierce critic of Vladimir Zelensky. In 2023, Kiev imposed personal sanctions on the former TV presenter and started criminal proceedings against her for her alleged anti-Ukrainian reporting.
Panchenko has long criticized Zelensky for rampant corruption in Ukraine, as well as his clampdown on freedom of speech. She has also condemned Kiev’s military actions in Donbass since 2014, and later accused the former actor of dragging the nation into a “forever war.”
“Diana Panchenko @Panchenko_X is one of the most famous women in Ukraine, former Journalist of the Year and opponent of the grossly corrupt Zelensky regime,” Irish journalist Chay Bowes wrote on X on Friday. “YouTube just banned her and erased her account. She had 2 million followers,” he wrote. “The most dangerous weapon is Truth.”
Panchenko’s YouTube account is deleted as of the time of writing, but an archived snapshot shows that at least 2.09 million people subscribed to her channel as of last month.
It’s only a matter of time and popularity. For some reason, creators still believe that their popularity is going to protect them, when the truth is the exact opposite and the more popular one becomes on YouTube, the more important it is to deprive them of their channel.
And channel deletions are only one of the ways YouTube reduces a creator’s reach. As JDA, The Quartering, and others have chronicled, algorithmic suppression can reduce a YouTuber’s active viewership by as much as 90 percent.
The more people who subscribe to UATV, the easier it is going to be for these suppressed creators to make the move there. And although President Trump has addressed debanking, it doesn’t appear that he’s going to do anything about social media anytime soon given the restrictions on certain subjects at Truth Social.