Demonetization is not censorship, imho. They support YouTube through their advertisers, and their advertisers don't want to be affiliated with guns. It makes sense that they won't pay you for videos that they can't monetize -- they're just passing on the loss to the video producer.

Beyond demonetization, YouTube did categorically ban videos demonstrating how to install and/or fabricate an autosear. In practice, this also extends to purely educational videos explaining how an autosear works.

"their advertisers don't want to be affiliated with guns"

Which ones? All of them? Who asked them? What about gun companies, they do not want any ads?

If you think that this isn't censorship, then I strongly encourage you to read Manufacturing Consent.

There is a difference between for-profit content and free speech.

Sorry, I'm not sure how this is a reply to my comment. Can you clarify?

The right to say something is not to be confused with the right to be paid to say something.

In fact, monetization creates a perverse incentive to prioritize financial gain over informing the public.

So, the central point (or one of them, at least) of Manufacturing Consent is that news/media organisations are shaped by what advertisers desire, such that the reporting is mostly friendly to a capitalistic worldview.

This is 100% analogous to what Google are doing with respect to demonetising youtube videos, and troubling for exactly the same reasons.

Isn't it troubling that the videos are not created to inform, but to keep the audience paying for them?

Yeah of course. But I'm not sure what else one would expect, given our societal structure.

If we can remove one perverse incentive at a time, it's still progress, but i agree that, without punishment for misinforming the public, and it's delicate to draw lines there, the problem won't go away.

When's the last time you saw a commercial for a handgun on TV?

I think you should extend this thought a little bit further.

If tech companies start deciding that certain gun content (to use the example in the parent) shouldn't be allowed, that will of course have an effect on the general population's opinion about guns and gun rights given their market control of online video. To me it's fairly obvious that this channel of media can be used to control what people think is "normal" or "allowed".

At the risk of Godwinizing the thread, one of the first oppressive operation against Jews in the Reich was a campaign "Kauft nicht bei den Juden" (Do not buy from Jews).

It did not carry weight of the law, you COULD still go to a Jewish shop and buy something, but the message was that the society disapproves, the state disapproves and you are a dirty being for doing so.

The result was severing of an important daily interaction between Jews and non-Jews. Once such casual contacts were severed, it was easier to convince the society that all Jews were evil, without the people having doubts like "but ironmonger Katz is such a nice person!" They did not know ironmonger Katz anymore, only a caricature of his people.

This is not the same thing. The campaign you refer to was created to harm a large group. Demonetization targets only the content makers but not their audience.

What, do content makers make videos purely for themselves? That's the whole point of monetization.

As rayiner said, the government can't get around the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech by only allowing the seller of a work to do so for free. Demonetization of certain topics on a blanket basis means that content creators have less incentive to make videos that they would have made otherwise, harming their potential audience.