> One of the videos that had been restricted was a trailer for one of his short films; another was an It Gets Better video aimed at LGBTQ youth. Sam had been shadow-banned, meaning that users couldn’t search for it on YouTube. None of the videos were sexually explicit or profane.

> ... five YouTube channels alleged that the platform had unfairly targeted LGBTQ content creators with practices similar to those described by Bardo: demonetizing videos, placing them in restricted mode without warning, and hiding them from search results.

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/lgbtq-...

Doesn't demonetization on YT just mean the ads still run but the money doesn't flow to the creator anymore? Considering YouTube does it that way with copyright claims and also automatically added ads to previously ad-free videos just because they could, it would surprise me if they'd remove video ads by themselves.

I even saw (this mostly was Facebook, but also was done on YouTube) where the channel/fan page purposefully switching videos to private while talking they are being censored.

Sometimes channels will do this because they have "strikes" shown on their creator pages, so they hide their videos to avoid having so many strikes they get shut down. Some science and engineering channels I watch have run into this problem.