"YouTube Are Cowards": Tadhg Hickey on Being Banned, Restored, and Refusing to Be Grateful
Tadhg Hickey was getting his assets ready to go live when he noticed his YouTube channel no longer existed. "I just saw that my page had been removed," he says. "And I kind of just laughed, because I was like, this must be some sort of a technical error." It wasn't. There had been no warning, no strike, no video demonetised in recent memory. "I don't have any slaps on the knuckles. There was no
due process. I didn't have warnings. At least, like, I've had my pages removed from Instagram, you have some warnings, you have some sort of indications." The stated reason, when it came, was not terrorism. "They don't even use the word terrorist," Hickey says. "I actually said terrorist in one of my videos, but they don't say terrorist, they just say endorsing or supporting criminal
organisations." What followed was, by his own account, the most effective piece of people power he has been involved in for years. Rather than absorb the ban quietly, as he had done with Instagram, he "went kind of a bit nuclear on it" and mobilised his audience. The video he posted about the removal drew close to a million views. Within roughly an hour of his appeal being filed, the channel was
restored. "By the time I'd sent in my sort of appeal, the page was back up," he says. "I've never experienced anything like it before. Like, obviously maybe YouTube are extra cowardly, I don't know." He is careful not to frame it as a favour granted. "I'm delighted my page is back up, but I'm not thankful to YouTube my page is back up. YouTube are cowards. The hierarchy of these big tech