Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival is the latest horror game adapting Clive Barker’s books and their movie counterparts. Known for their explicit sexual content and graphic violence, these books, movies, and games are not for the faint of heart, but also, apparently, not for YouTube either.
As IGN first reported, YouTuber j0nathan has been “permanently” banned from YouTube for showing the opening scenes of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival on his channel. The scene contains exceptionally graphic and sexually explicit scenes, all of which are necessary to the story and not in any way “gratifying,” i.e., pornographic. Even so, YouTube reportedly banned j0nathan for showing explicit sexual content that is supposed to be gratifying in nature, despite him censoring the screen using black boxes.
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His pleas on social media and via YouTube’s own appeals system seem to have resulted in no remedies, with j0nathan now claiming that each of his applications and interactions with YouTube appear to be handled by AI rather than actual humans. Every time he tried to get his channel back, which has 3,000 videos and 190,000 subscribers, he would be told that YouTube “reviewed” its decision and decided to stand by it.
But j0nathan doesn’t believe any human eyes have actually looked at this decision, and he particularly thinks it was an erroneous automatic decision because uncensored versions of the same scene exist on the platform without any trouble.
He also tried tagging Saber Interactive itself on social media, as well as YouTube, but aside from the latter’s generic responses, he’s been met with radio silence. J0nathan claims the channel was his main source of income, which he has now been completely deprived of.
YouTube has been implementing AI moderation for a while now, and it’s made a lot of wrong decisions on numerous occasions in the past year or so. Most people, after a lot of trouble and effort, do end up remedying the situation, though often at the expense of their channels’ growth and momentum. Just another “perk” this ridiculous technology is supposed to be giving to humanity.
