YouTube has been cracking down on swearing lately, trying to give it the same general feel as dinner at your grandparents' house. The rules, from last November (opens in new tab) (via Kotaku (opens in new tab)), prohibit videos that use profanity in the title, thumbnail, first seven seconds, or "consistently throughout the video," whatever that means. This affects streamers who play a mature game and, understandably, even affects videos uploaded before the rules were announced.

Even more troubling for the platform's content creators, YouTube has now decided to treat all curse words as basically equivalent: whether you bark the F-word or humbly mutter "ass," YouTube will crack down on you regardless I promise you that. On the plus side, according to YouTube's arcane laws, "hell" and "damn" are no longer considered profanity.

Unsurprisingly, more than a few YouTubers are angry about the sudden and under-reported threat to their lives. A video (opens in new tab) by creator Daniel Condren on his RTGame channel details the saga of the sudden removal of a number of his old videos by YouTube. When his appeal was rejected, YouTube support told him only that "as you know, all content available on the platform must follow these guidelines, regardless of when it was uploaded or when the policy was implemented. He was then strongly advised to "continue to carefully observe" YouTube's various guidelines when he creates future videos.

It is staggering that Condren, who has nearly 3 million channel subscribers, had to fall down the rabbit hole of appeals and removals before he received a direct response from a YouTube representative. Clearly, YouTube's communication about the new rules has not been very successful, and Condren is not alone in his frustration. Voice actor and YouTuber Cho Sung-won conducted an informal experiment on his ProZD channel. in a video provocatively titled "youtube is run by fools (opens in new tab)," Cho avoids cursing for the first 15 seconds or so of the video while explaining the new guidelines He explained about the new guidelines, then repeated the abuse four times.

Even though Cho's profanity occurred after the first 15 seconds of the video and was a small percentage of the entire script, he stated that the video was removed two days later (open in new tab). Just as when the Mega Man documentary was bizarrely restricted (opens in new tab) for violating YouTube's "sex and nudity" policy, the left hand of this platform does not know what the right hand is doing, leaving enforcement to the whims of individual moderators, I can't help but feel that it has become a nightmare for creators to figure out what they can and cannot do.