History Killers: YouTube Hates History (and Historians)
Google-Owned Corp. Continues to Kill History
Over the years, I have been asked by many why I do not have a YouTube channel where I talk about history and my work. This comes up routinely from loyal readers, as well as from colleagues I come across at conferences and other venues where historians appear and share their scholarship. Plenty of historians, academically-trained and otherwise, have created channels on YT to promote their work and to create a sideline revenue stream. If nothing else, I often hear, “Why not do it? It will increase your reach and influence.”
Here is the problem: I simply do not trust YouTube, or—for that matter—Google, nor any of its subsidiary companies. I am not a fan of their leadership role in the growth of data mining, data sharing, and surveilance capitalism. I am not a fan that educational institutions, including most of higher ed. in the U.S. (including the community colleges and universities I have either attended and/or worked at as a professor) rely on gmail for their email systems. By doing so, these institutions save a lot of money and are able to easily incorporate other Google-based apps into their online userface for students and faculty, but this also makes academic institutions more beholden (and arguably puts them further under the influence) of Google’s already enormous reach.
Even without my personal issues with Google’s business practices, I long ago decided not to utilize YouTube as an historian because the platform has slowly but surely been aiming to kill history and history education. History YouTubers, whether they are self-educated amateurs or academically trained historians with advanced degrees in the field, have routinely seen their work demonetized, forced to be edited, or outright banned. In many of these instances, possibly most, this was not due to incorrect information (certainly a potential problem, but not what this historian would deem worthy of censorship), but because of artificial intelligence and overly-sensitive human employees conducting manual reviews. Additionally, YouTube’s current algorithm appears to be suppressing history content as a matter of course.
A YouTube channel I personally enjoy and among the few I would recommend—in no small part because it is operated by a trained historian who is very level-headed and steers clear of histrionic political assertions—is Vlogging Through History. In a recent video, host Chris Mowery laments the state of history and historians on YouTube. Watch that video here.
The simple fact is that I never really considered putting my work on YouTube because I find the business practices and overall approach of Google to be completely unethical. A company that began with the slogan, “Don’t be evil,” and then explicitly dropped this mission statement years ago says more than enough for me. Though I have indeed been happy to appear as an intervewee on some channels over the years, because some content creators are interested in discussing my work, the practices of Google and the ongoing history-killing aims of YouTube mean that I am never likely to call these places home. All the more reason that alternative outlets like Substack must remain and ought to be supported.
[James M. Masnov is a writer, historian, lecturer, and a Columbian Distinguished Fellow at George Washington University in Washington, DC. He has been a contributor at Pure Insights, the Brownstone Institute, Armstrong Journal of History, the Oregon Encyclopedia, among other publications. His newest book, Rights Reign Supreme: An Intellectual History of Judicial Review and the Supreme Court, is available here. His first book, History Killers and Other Essays by an Intellectual Historian, is available here.]
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