The fan-funding platform Patreon has removed altCensored, a website that archives videos that have been censored by YouTube.
The story: Patreon is a platform that allows people to directly support their favorite creators in the form of monthly memberships. altCensored said the money they made on Patreon allowed them to pay for web hosting services.
altCensored told Reclaim The Net in a statement that it received around $100 a month on the platform.
“We depended on Patreon to mainly cover around $100 a month in hosting. We are just trying to document removed material from YouTube and cover our hosting costs as we do it,” altCensored said.
Patreon removed altCensored’s creator page, saying that its website promotes “negative stereotypes or segregational content towards protected communities.”
The company informed altCensored in an email that their page has been removed because of violations of Patreon’s community guidelines on hate speech.
“While we welcome impassionate debate and diverse viewpoints, we don’t allow creators to propagate negative stereotypes or segregational content toward protected communities. Because the website you’re funding hosts content of this nature, your creator page was removed,” a representative of Patreon’s Trust & Safety team wrote to altCensored.
The email claimed that Patreon takes “the removal of pages very seriously” and told altCensored that the company only goes as far as removing a page “after a thorough review process.”
Patreon gave altCensored the opportunity to appeal the decision, according to the screenshot of the email published by the outlet.
Worth noting: The email did not point to any videos from altCensored’s website that break Patreon’s rules.
altCensored said it is “not optimistic about reversing their decision.” They also said that they have not appealed the removal and did not say whether they plan to do so.
According to the web analytics company SimilarWeb, altCensored had around 500,000 unique monthly visitors in 2020.
