Games journalist Alyssa Mercante has been dealing with a lot of crap for a long while. In a recent video detailing the past year of harassment from several YouTubers after the publication of an article for Kotaku debunking a conspiracy theory regarding narrative development studio Sweet Baby Inc.. In her video she shows the varying forms of harassment she’s faced in the meantime: emailed threats from anonymous accounts and defaming comments from several content creators. A major point of the video and a sentiment Mercante has repeated in streams is that these content creators are profiting from harassing her, rewarded by the algorithm for the attention brought to their videos via ad revenue.

Then YouTube took her video down, citing bullying and harassment.

Mercante was able to edit and upload the video and as of around 24 hours since the original upload, the new version is still around. What caused the video to be taken down remains to be seen, but there is already something we can learn from this: if YouTube continues to push ad revenue towards content creators harassing Mercante, YouTube effectively cannot be trusted to protect its user base or enforce its terms of service.

If you care at all about any of this or even if you’re merely skeptical, go watch the video at the link at the top of this post and see it for yourself. I’m not naming any particular names in this blog, though I am using an image for the thumbnail that comes from Mercante’s video: a collage of thumbnails and titles of videos regarding her from one YouTuber in particular. I’m not naming any particular names because the point of this blog is not to target any single individual, but rather to use this situation as a bridge to discuss a larger issue: YouTube and other social media platforms allow harassment when it doesn’t get them in too much trouble, because all ad revenue is good ad revenue. And playing by these peoples’ rules and attempting to harass them back will only give them more of what they want: free content to react to in order to make more content.

So we’re going to ask to speak to the manager.

Making this a problem for YouTube or Twitch or whatever platform hosts this kind of behavior puts pressure on the platforms to enforce the terms of service they claim to operate under but fail to meaningfully enforce. Being loud and annoying to the people who own these platforms, in my mind, is one of the better ways we can deal with this kind of behavior. We have known for too long that we cannot expect these people to just stop, because even if they do, someone will come along to replace them so long as this kind of content is a viable business model. Ultimately, these people know there is money to be made by doing what is being done to Mercante. By being aggressive with the platforms themselves, by urging them to see and respond to these patterns, we can improve the platforms we care about and improve the internet’s ability to not be a cesspool of misinformation and hate. We need to make it clear this is a problem these platforms are expected to solve if they want to continue having the user bases that they have.