A few hours ago, Steven Crowder sat down for a long live-stream discussing his current situation regarding being demonetized over the whining complaints of Vox’s Carlos Maza. This is in addition to a short update he did earlier in the afternoon, as reported on by RedState’s Brandon Morse.

Maza claims Crowder is harassing him by doing the occasional comedic rebuttal video to Maza’s silly, partisan claims on his show “Strikethrough.” Making jokes about someone on YouTube is not harassment by any definition, as the term indicates an active engagement with another person. Crowder has never directly addressed Maza and if critiquing and laughing at someone passively on a show is “harassment,” then every comedy and political production has to be shut down tonight.

These realities haven’t stopped Maza from leading a campaign to try to get Crowder banned from YouTube.

When YouTube first announced he wouldn’t be banned, Maza cried about it. Then when YouTube did an about face and said they were demonetizing Crowder, Maza still cried. Only complete banishment is good enough for our progressive hero who has skin so thin he’s translucent.

Here’s the live stream Crowder did tonight. It’s worth watching for the comedy value alone but there’s also a lot of information given and some good discussion.

Over 50,000 people watching @scrowder's live video explaining the #VoxAdpocalypse right now. People are really fed up with the double standard in Big Tech censorship. pic.twitter.com/yqV6QLmtGx

— Jessica Fletcher (@heckyessica) June 5, 2019

Here’s the situation.

Crowder’s channel is currently demonetized completely. The old rule was to only demonetize videos that supposedly violated YouTube’s community standards. The new rule appears to be that entire channels are being demonetized over single videos.

The reason YouTube gave for Crowder’s demonetization is that he has two videos up, one of which discusses sexual assault via a survivor who describes some of the horror going on in the U.K. The other is a video that includes some jokes about homosexuality. Out of his thousands of videos, those are the only ones YouTube could come up with to justify their actions and there’s noway that YouTube actually did a real “review” in under 24 hours. They just found some stuff on the fly and flagged it.

The other issue is a shirt that Crowder has a link to that reads “Socialism is for figs.” Obviously, the shirt is meant make someone double take, but it does not actually contain the phrase Maza accused Crowder of putting on the shirt.

This is YouTube’s latest comment on the matter, along with a refresher of what an annoying clown Carlos Maza is.

To clarify, in order to reinstate monetization on this channel, he will need to remove the link to his T-shirts.

— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) June 5, 2019

We’ve gone around in circles a lot the past few days over this, but YouTube, after initially caving to Maza, appears to be softening their stance. This is probably a wink and a nod type outreach to Crowder. He does something simple like removing a link to a t-shirt and YouTube gets to save face by claiming they still enforced their rules.

Meanwhile, according to his stream, Crowder is preparing legal action if it comes to that.

This isn’t over by a long shot and in the long run, this could turn out to be a good thing. It’s time to have this fight and make social media companies pick a side. They are either publishers or platforms, but they can’t be both and escape liability.

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