One of the things that's important when we discuss any kind of censorship and freedom of speech is what we call "Chilling Effects". If you know taking a political position is going to result in your family being arrested and put in prison, then your speech is being curbed even without being punished and it's one of the insidious wrongs of censorship.

When a grown man who was in the marines for several years is afraid he's going to lose his youtube channel talking about why he can't find pork ribs, that's a chilling effect. When a multi-million dollar videogame streamer is afraid he's going to be demonetized if he talks about why he's filming from home instead of his studio, that's a chilling effect.

The goal of a good censor is not to enforce censorship. It's to get the people to enforce it themselves.

Has anyone been demonetized for simply mentioning Coronavirus or is this just their precaution?

Now the conversation is drifting away from the original point so I want to be sure

Tim Pool has talked about it regularly, how if independent Youtubers even speak the word their video will be instantly demonetized, but bigger YT channels (those with millions of subs) as well as mainstream media outlets can use the term with no ill effects. He's such a prolific content creator across three channels I can't single out an exact video from the past ~90 days of material for you though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SamandTolki/comments/foem3m/h3h3_up...

https://youtu.be/C3j4TEUeDbw

Here's a related article:

https://onezero.medium.com/youtubes-independent-creators-are...

"masks"

What does this comment mean?

The word "masks" got my friend's online ads shutdown temporarily.