When Gatekeeping Becomes the Algorithm
Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss.
The expectation of independent digital media used to be simple: no gatekeepers, no network executives, no ratings apparatus deciding who gets heard. Anyone with something real to say could say it. This promise turned out to be partially true and the part that wasn’t is worth looking at as soon as possible. The internet as we know it is being methodically sanitized and millions of videos on YouTube are being deleted across the world, every week.
Mass Subconscious Assumptions
Before we talk about what happened, we need to talk about what the vast majority of internet users often believe. Because the trap only works if we don’t see it. And most of us don’t, not out of stupidity, but out of a set of assumptions so widely shared that they too often feel like common sense:
1. It’s free.
2. Everyone is on YouTube.
3. (People’s Subscriber Count =) Is it worthy of my time?
4. This is where it’s happening online.
5. It’s here for me to share.
6. “I have nothing to hide.” The Global Narrative Platform Owners use to justify mass surveillance.
7. My content and my channel here is mine.
8. Google and YouTube need my content, they need me to make money.
They don't. They want content, not necessarily your content. Yours is interchangeable with everyone else's the moment it stops serving their algorithm's priorities. While some creators pay YouTube directly through memberships and features, and others earn ad revenue from their content, what most don't compute is that Google is not in the advertising business the way most people think. Google is in the data and intelligence business. Advertising is simply how they monetize what they know about you and your audience. The revenue you receive is a fraction of the value they extract from your content, your viewers, and their behavior. You are the unpaid labor producing the raw material, your content that attracts the audience whose attention is then sold to advertisers. No individual creator is indispensable to a platform with hundreds of millions and in some cases billions of uploads. That asymmetry is why there is no negotiation, no appeal, no door to knock on. You have no leverage because the business model was never built around or for you.
9. If you want Distribution, Access, and Scale, YouTube is the best place to get it. People are Visual.
Every one of these felt reasonable not only since the beginning of video on the internet, but for many years. Some of them were even partially true in the beginning, before the platform matured, before the algorithm was put in charge, before you became the real product, before the terms of service became the fine print few people read on a contract nobody got a chance to negotiate.
What nobody asked and what the platform was designed to prevent you from asking was: free for whom, exactly? Whose work? Whose information? And to what end?
The New Gatekeeper Nobody Elected
YouTube is the most globally pervasive video platform that people go to besides Google itself to validate someone’s credibility, substance, and worthiness, aside for watching and enjoying video content. It has literally become the default measure of whether a voice is worth listening to. And yet, very few of us stop to ask where this platform came from, or who actually built it? The evolution and the progression of a structure really matters.
YouTube was founded in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim working out of a garage. Google bought it in November 2006 for $1.65 billion. Google never built it. They bought and absorbed what three other people built.
The advertising revenue model powering YouTube’s front end of the business, the mechanism that made it appear worth buying in the first place, and today contributes to the funding of its gatekeeping power, wasn’t Google’s invention either. That model was pioneered by Bill Gross and his Idea Lab company GoTo.com, based in Pasadena, California. Google later settled a lawsuit over a number of related patents in exchange for shares then worth approximately $350 million. They walked away with the model that Bill Gross developed and shared with them in a potential joint venture deal that Google did not consummate with Idea Lab.
This is the foundation of the Global Digital Gatekeeper: a platform built by others, running on a business model settled out of a lawsuit, now deciding through a centralized algorithm that nobody outside the company and very few can ever audit from even inside the company, whose voice is and isn’t worth hearing.
Do you comprehend the parasitic & highly disconnected consciousness that’s really operating this platform?
YouTube has managed to convince the vast public via influence, that if someone is not doing well there, that they aren’t really worth your time, your attention and your advertising dollars. Subscriber Counts have replaced both the Nielsen Ratings for television and the Arbitron Ratings for Radio. Yet, You Tube appeared to most of us as “really different”. Centralized algorithms replaced the programming executives and networks. The decision-making moved inside a black box of zero transparency, no real human appeals process & no human interaction or explanation required.
Few of us ask once we see the Subscriber Counts are low:
• Who is this person or group & what are they offering?
• What have they done and what are they doing?
• What could they bring that’s helpful, different and engaging?
These questions used to matter. After many years, a Subscriber Count answers all of them before anyone has a chance to think.
“YouTube convinced the vast public that if someone is not doing well there, that they are not really worth your time and attention.” Kim Greenhouse
Shifting Terms, Shifting Algorithms, Shifting Ground
You agreed to this. You didn’t know you agreed to it, but you did. In fact, the moment you built your audience on a platform you didn’t own nor understand. And here’s what no one may have told you: what you agreed to violates every modicum of human decency that one could imagine. You are being stripped of all of your rights to your content. Did you know this?
• The terms of service can change without notice that impact anything you put on YouTube now & retroactively.
• The algorithm shifts without announcement. Your Subscriber Count & Potential Views Could Disappear & Dwindle.
• The rules that governed your content yesterday may not be the rules that are being applied to it today.
• You will not be told when the ground moved underneath you. You are investing in & depending on a Losing Game for most YouTube users. You have no way to know what is actual organic interest vs manufactured interest, what can be seen vs what is allowed to be seen.
Sarah Westall’s lawsuit with Google revealed this in its starkest form: the contract language that permitted YouTube to do what they did to her channel was added shortly before they took her site down. Not after. At around the same or shortly before that timeframe.
You cannot appeal a rule that didn’t exist when you built everything on its absence.
This is the invisible architecture of YouTube’s Gatekeeping: not a single decision you can point to, but a slow accumulation of changes you don’t see, terms you didn’t know were there, or had shifted, and an algorithm making adjustments inside a virtual Black Box people outside the company can audit.
The old boss put it in writing. The new boss changes the writing while you’re not looking. Slowly & imperceptibly without any concern for you and your work and the human investment of your time, energy, money, or even your livelihood.
What This Black Box of a Platform Actually Does
It doesn’t just measure popularity. It also can manufacture it.
• Channels get suppressed without being told why.
• Subscriber counts get frozen or rolled back.
• Content gets removed retroactively going back years, flagged by AI that nobody programmed to understand context, nuance, or the difference between a tribute to a late doctor and medical misinformation. Imagine doing a 30 minute audio tribute to your late Doctor & YouTube goes back 10 years, removes it, gives you a strike for Medical Misinformation in 2023. My Tribute to my late Dr. James Privitera was taken down 11 years after it was up on You Tube. The link below was the date it went up on itsrainmakingtime.com before it was placed on You Tube so you see how far back it was released. https://itsrainmakingtime.ch/remembering-dr-james-privitera/
Here is the screenshot of the You Tube Strike, Take Down & Rejected Appeal:
Here was my 8 point appeal:
Nearly every medical interview I’ve conducted over the years was removed entirely. Episodes touching on 9/11 at a purely forensic level, not even about politics which also should not have mattered, were removed regardless of who was speaking — a commercial pilot who flew private missions all over the world, a materials physicist and engineer. It wasn’t about just what was said. It was about the topic itself and who said it, who had real access, real knowledge, expertise to sort out and share their findings. The AI wasn’t evaluating credibility or accuracy. It was pattern-matching, and the pattern it was trained to eliminate were certain conversations themselves.
Even if an Appeal was filed within 24 hours and denied in less than 24 hours, done. There’s no further recourse. Your work can exist for years and then, all of a sudden it gets disappeared, deleted, erased, as if it never existed. Good will gone. Likes gone. Viewer Count Gone. Your Video Production Gone without a trace. If you depended on YouTube to safekeep your video files, they’re gone. You will never get them returned to you. No courtesy. No decency. Their deletion was total and unrecoverable. You were given not even another week to make another copy of your work. This is an example of cruelty. Who authorized this way of operating? Who designed these terms of engagement? This is part of their corporate consciousness.
YouTube is Temporary: Don’t Treat it As Reliable Now or In The Future
Somebody with 250,000 subscribers gets a thousand views, yet they still have their channel. They still show up in search. But they might as well not be there, because, if you’re not reaching anybody, you’re just a ghost that the platform keeps around to say it never took you down. This is a totally different mechanism or tactic of Plausible Deniability. Just because you were not taken down does not mean that an algorithm was not set up to mark you or your work as justifiable to Suppress, Censor and Shadow Ban.
What You Need to Know: Shadow Banning
Shadow banning is when a platform secretly suppresses your content without telling you — and without removing it. Your account stays active, your posts stay up, your channel still exists. Everything looks normal from your end. But the platform has quietly decided, behind the scenes, to make your content invisible or nearly invisible to everyone else.
The person being shadow banned has no idea it’s happening. They keep posting, keep producing, keep showing up — while their reach quietly collapses. No notification. No violation notice. No explanation. Just fewer views, fewer new followers, fewer search appearances, fewer recommendations. The numbers quietly stop growing, or actively shrink, with nothing to point to, nothing to appeal, and no way to prove it’s deliberate rather than just “how the algorithm works.”
For example, YouTube had my subscriber count at 10,200 views for over 10 years in 2021. Only now, it’s at 10,400? My guests alone are so remarkable that this Subscriber Count is impossible. Here’s how the algorithm actually does it:
Search Suppression. When someone searches for your name or your topic, the algorithm decides what order results appear in. Shadow-banned content gets pushed down, not removed, just buried on page 4 or 5 where almost nobody looks. You’re technically there. You’re functionally invisible.
Recommendation Withholding. YouTube’s “Up Next” sidebar and homepage recommendations are the primary way new audiences discover content. The algorithm controls this entirely. If it stops recommending your videos to new viewers, your growth halts completely. Existing subscribers might still find you if they remember to look. New people never discover you at all.
Notification Throttling. Even subscribers who’ve clicked the bell to receive notifications about your new uploads can have those notifications quietly suppressed. The subscriber count says they’re subscribed. They simply never get told when you post something new.
Engagement Velocity Manipulation. The algorithm treats early engagement — views, likes, comments in the first hours after posting — as a signal of quality. If it artificially slows how fast your video gets shown to people immediately after upload, that early engagement number comes in low, which the algorithm reads as “low quality content,” which triggers even less distribution. It becomes self-reinforcing.
Demonetization Without Removal. Marking content as “not suitable for most advertisers” doesn’t take the video down but means it earns nothing and gets deprioritized in recommendations — since the platform has less financial incentive to surface content it can’t monetize.
Keyword and Topic Throttling. Specific topics can be flagged so that any content touching those subjects gets automatically deprioritized across the board regardless of the creator, regardless of the quality, regardless of who is speaking. The topic itself becomes the trigger.
What makes all of this so effective is that none of these actions leave a paper trail you can point to. The platform can always say the algorithm is neutral, that your content simply didn’t perform well, that they never touched your account. And technically, every one of those statements could be true while the algorithm quietly ensures the performance never had a chance to happen.
It is the most insidious form of platform censorship precisely because it is deniable. The platform never removed anything. They just made sure almost nobody that would even be interested ever saw it.
The Time Capsule: See For Yourself
Between 2021 and July 2026, I conducted over 37 long form interviews and posted them on this platform with some of the most important, credentialed, and independent voices working today, many with millions of followers, deep expertise, and access many journalists never get. YouTube decided that this body of work wasn’t worth your time.
You can find them all in the It’s Rainmaking Time! archive, a real-time historical record of conversations that matter, with people who had something real to say. I was offered 3.5 million dollars for this archive in 2014 and turned it down.
All of these have music, animation and engaging dialogue and you would never know it. Examples on YouTube:
Seema Anand: Beloved Kama Sutra Author, Storyteller & Global Sex Coach: The Art of Seduction done 4 yrs ago: 989 views as of July 1, 2026. She has half a million followers.
OceanGate: My Commentary & Special Guest Lyn Buchanan: under 500 views. I did a test & removed it and put the same video back up last year. Now only 250 views.
Lyn Buchanan: Legendary Remote Viewer: The Real Stargate: Under 2,000 views as of July 1st. Aired: 4 yrs ago.
Ahmed, Owner of The Car Care Nut: 1.78 Million followers: 438 views. Aired: January 2026.
Nia Vardalos: Writer, Actress & Star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding — one of the highest-grossing romantic comedies of all time. Aired: July 29, 2013. 469 views.
Tommy James: of The Shondells: Rock & Roll Hall of Famed Musician: Aired: 2013. Under 1,800 views. Followers: Each video is different some 17 million views.
Corinne Drewery: of Swing Out Sister: Beloved Singer: Under 10,000 views 14 years ago. Subscribers: 105,000. Sold recordings for the last 30 years world-wide.
John Kiriakou: Author & Beloved Whistleblower: Under 2,100 views. Aired June 2026. His popularity has literally exploded the last couple of months into millions of views.
Sarah Westall: A Case Study
Sarah Westall, who said that she has over 250,000 subscribers across platforms, built her audience through years of independent journalism. This includes doctors, scientists, whistleblowers, researchers who challenged the mainstream narrative on COVID, on elections, on financial systems. Not fringe voices. Experts whose assessments, in many cases, have since been vindicated.
Two weeks before the 2020 election, her entire YouTube channel was taken down. No reason was given. Five years later, still no reason has been given.
She led a lawsuit all the way to the Ninth Circuit, with the former Chief Justice of the Ninth Circuit as her advisor. The decision came back in eight weeks that was one-sided, unsigned by the judges, designated as unpublished, so that it cannot be used or cited as a precedent. The contract language that justified the takedown had been added to YouTube’s terms of service at a similar timeframe when her channel was taken down.
Meanwhile, fake channels using her name and her content remain on the platform undisturbed. When she raises it, YouTube doesn’t respond. There is no door to knock on. There is no human to communicate with.
This is not an edge case. The group she was part of — 15 people were all taken down simultaneously — had, by her account, “more combined listeners at that time than all of mainstream media combined”. The old boss would have called that the ratings. Sarah thinks that the new boss perceived it as a threat.
Listen to Kim’s full interview with Sarah Westall here: https://itsrainmakingtime.ch/removed-for-what-initiations-into-digital-censorship/
The Metric As Social Currency: Who Decides Value?
Here is where it becomes personal.
At least 3 former guests of mine, people with whom interviews exist, people who know that the work and my track record don’t even respond to current invitations. Their PR people don’t respond. Not even a courtesy decline. Not even an acknowledgment of having received the invitation to return at a time when video is popular and widely used. Not even a “thank you but no thank you”.
The unspoken logic operating behind the silence: the YouTube Subscriber count didn’t clear the threshold. Could the metric have became the filter? Not: What has this person done across 15 years and 500+ interviews? Not: What could they bring that nobody else is bringing? Not: Who have they talked to, what have they uncovered, what do they know? Or, was it that I covered Constitutional Matters, or content that was very different than theirs? Or, did their appointed handlers or official PR Gatekeepers look at the YouTube counts and think it was perfectly fine to not even respond to the invitation and pretend they never got it? Which was it?
Just: What does the number of subscribers on YouTube say ?
This is the legacy media gatekeeping model intact, operational, and more powerful than before, because at least the old gatekeepers had to justify their decisions to someone. The algorithm justifies itself to no one.
Polarized Digital Space: Social & Legal Cancellations
We are living in one of the most polarized societies that manifest themselves digitally and energetically in recorded history. And polarization, it turns out, is the perfect accelerant for the kind of gatekeeping I’ve been describing, because it hands anyone with a grievance one of the many weapons that requires no evidence, no legal standard, and no accountability.
One of the weapons is the concept and new domain of “Hate Speech.”
Originally a moral category with a specific, serious meaning, “hate speech” has been stretched, deliberately and systematically, until it now covers almost any spoken or written expression that someone, somewhere, finds objectionable. In today’s digital environment, if you share that you are opposed to something, someone, a policy, a governmental action, or a new law, you can be reported en mass. You don’t have to threaten anyone. You don’t have to lie and if you have lied, who is deciding this? You don’t have to incite anything. You simply have to hold a position, belief, understanding, commentary, paradigm, body of expertise, or knowledge that someone or some group, on the other side of a polarized domain or moment, or opposing viewpoint disagrees with strongly enough to file a complaint.
And then the platform’s AI, which either isn’t reading context, content progression, or can properly and fully weigh intent which was never designed to distinguish between genuine hatred and uncomfortable disagreement, makes its decision. It does so quickly, without appeal and without explanation.
The result comes in three forms, and most people only know about the first one:
1. Gone. The channel, the video, the account gets removed. Visible, documentable, fightable in court if you have the resources, the energy and the years to do it. Most people don’t and won’t. Sarah Westall raised the funds to fight it and she fought it all the way to the Ninth Circuit and still lost.
2. Sequestered. Your channel is still there. It appears to still exist. Your videos are still up. But the algorithm has placed you somewhere nobody seems to find you, a quiet corner of the platform where your 250,000 subscribers get a thousand views, where search doesn’t surface you, where new audiences can’t discover you. Nothing was officially done. There is nothing to appeal. You simply stop reaching people, and you have no way to prove why.
3. Silenced without being touched. The most powerful form of censorship, because the platform never has to act at all. Just knowing that sharing a certain opinion, naming a certain name, or taking a position on a contested issue could trigger a report, could invite a coordinated mass-reporting campaign is enough. People self-censor. They soften their language. They avoid the topic. The platform did nothing. The chilling effect did everything.
The old boss canceled people through contracts, lawyers, and public pressure campaigns you could see and name. The new boss lets the crowd do it, with a report button and an algorithm, inside a system designed to look like neutral enforcement of neutral rules.
It is neither neutral nor blind.
The Terms Few of Us Have Read
You agreed to this. Here is what you actually agreed to:
• A platform you don’t own can remove your content without explanation, retroactively.
• The rules governing that removal can be rewritten at the moment of or just before enforcement.
• Your content, your audience data, your behavioral patterns are amassed, calculated, and used toward ends the terms of service describe in language designed not to be read.
• When you are taken down, you have no meaningful right of appeal. It doesn’t matter what’s true, accurate & verifiable.
• When fake versions of you, or your body of work remains on the platform after you’re “gone” or have been “deleted”, the platform has no obligation to act.
“I have nothing to hide” was the coordinated and often repeated narrative they gave you so you wouldn’t ask what they were doing with what you were showing them.
“My content is mine” was the assumption they let you keep so you would keep producing content.
Meet The New Boss
The old gatekeeping was visible. You could see the network. You could name the executive. You could point to the ratings book and say: this is the system, and this is how it decides.
The new gatekeeping is invisible by design. It looks like a number. It feels like a market signal, organic, democratic and earned. It isn’t. It’s a platform’s algorithm, serving a platform’s interests, shaped by a platform’s agenda, inside a black box nobody outside the company can audit, enforced by terms few of us read that can change without notice.
Same function. Same power. Different costume.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
What This Asks of Us
• Support the platforms that support free communication with your presence, your subscriptions, your shares.
• Know who owns your audience. If you can’t download your list, you don’t own it. Remember when you could alert all of your subscribers that you have a new video? You haven’t been able to do that for many years. This was removed from you.
• Understand that the Subscriber Count on a platform is not the same as the reach you actually have or the reach you could build on a platform where transparency is important and central, where honesty thrives, where communication is encouraged and where users aren’t artificially controlled.
• The next time you screen someone through their YouTube count before deciding whether they’re worth your time: ask yourselves who taught you to think this way and why? Do you have any idea the conversations you are missing out on?
It’s Rainmaking Time! needs your participation. The internet is being sanitized. Even The Way Back Machine might soon be gone. It’s by design.
I’m worth your time and have many more years to provide what’s needed and wanted to be of service to this and future generations. I would appreciate your contribution to this work and to sharing this newsletter with everyone you know.