Mumkey Jones aka Tyler Millard is a YouTuber who makes edgy dark comedy video. He had around 500k subscribers on his main channel until recently. YouTube has decided to get rid of the creator completely in a seemingly targeted attack. In a video which is now gone, Mumkey explains that he woke up to see two strikes on both his main channel and his second.
What is a Strike?
Getting a Community Guidelines Strike is a big deal. The intent of a strike is to let the creator know that something they posted is not okay to be on YouTube that breaks the community guidelines. The creator can clean up such content and eventually the strike will go away after a couple months. Until then, the creator will have some privileges on the site taken away temporarily. If the creator continues to post the content, they can get another strike. As you can guess, three strikes and you’re out. Copyright strikes are essentially the same thing, except the creator was posting copyrighted content not under “fair use”. The Community Guidelines (as of 12/15/18) prohibit:
- Nudity or Sexual Content
- Harmful or Dangerous Content
- Hateful Content
- Violent or Graphic Content
- Harassment and Cyberbullying
- Spam, Misleading Metadata, and Scams
- Threats
- Copyright
- Privacy
- Impersonation
- Child Safty
- Additional Policies (quite vague, isn’t it?)
Mumkey’s Strikes
Mumkey woke up to find two strikes on both his main channel and his secondary. He was given four strikes while he slept. They were all on videos making fun of school shooter, Elliot Rogers and one of the audiobook of Elliot Roger’s manifesto. Mumkey hurries to private all his videos, thinking that someone didn’t like him and was reporting all of his videos. As a test, he uploaded an Elliot Rogers video that was previously manually reviewed by YouTube that was deemed, acceptable. He had the video on private with no views. That video was stricken along with another video unlisted on his alternative channel. That was the third strike for both channels, terminating both accounts. Mumkey tried going to his third channel, a gaming channel. That channel was taken down a short time later. He created two more channels under the ownership of someone else. Those were also taken down, despite the lack of videos. Mumkey has now created a Twitch account, uploaded old videos to PornHub, and is teaming up to create a website. The reason for the PornHub uploads stems from a meme about people moving from YouTube to the site to save their channels. Mumkey appeared on a couple podcast style streams following the aftermath.
The Fight
Many creators of all sizes, as well as a large number of his fans and fans of dark comedy, have been fighting to get Mumkey reinstated. Many creators were contacting their connections at YouTube and fighting for him. Some with personal connections to the employees at YouTube have even been doing their part. I will not disclose the particular information on that one as of now. Go to any Tweet by YouTube and you will see the comments flooded by #SaveMumkeyJones. Mumkey Jones isn’t a particularly huge creator, but this issue has brought a lot of people together.
How about stop unfairly targeting Mumkey Jones? Your golden boy Logan Paul got away with filming a fresh corpse, but Mumkey gets blacklisted for edgy humor
Your site and your company are embarrassing & you don't actually care about free speech unless it's what you approve of.
— CMC Garbage Factory (@CMCroley96) December 14, 2018
https://twitter.com/OfficerCoconut/status/1073780096903737344
What does this mean for creators of edgy or dark comedic content? The targeted harassment of a creator is an issue. This could happen to any creator YouTube decides they don’t like at any time, regardless of what they’ve said in the past. Going after a smaller channel has led some to speculate whether YouTube is trying to make an example of him in order to not cause too much backlash going after a bigger creator. A similar thing happened in a real-life scenario with Count Dankula being charged and accused of hate speech for a video of pug doing Nazi salutes. Many said this was because they couldn’t exactly go after Pewdiepie as this happened shortly after Pewdiepie’s nazi jokes and the hit piece by The Wall Street Journal. Granted there is no concrete evidence this is what is happening to Mumkey, but there is a pattern many notice. If the theory is correct, this could be extremely bad for creators.
Analysing the Mumkey situation, it's very clear YouTube just wanted to get rid of him.
It's very evident that platforms are getting rid of people simply for being edgy.#MumkeyDidNothingWrong
— Count Dankula (@CountDankulaTV) December 14, 2018
In order to fix this, YouTube must be completely transparent as to the reasoning for every strike and termination. They can not simply categorize it under a vague title. Many people use YouTube as their source of income, it’s their job. This is no matter to be taken lightly. You have to legally give a reason for terminating someone’s employment in the state of California (as well as others), so why does this not apply to YouTube? YouTube must also write clearer rules on their community guidelines and not leave it so vague. Leaving rules in a vague state leaves room for corruption and has proved destructive in every company that has adopted this practice. If YouTube has malicious intent, they will not clarify their community guidelines.
Support Mumkey Jones
Mumkey Jones has been going through a tough time. Not too long ago a good friend of his relapsed and became physical with his girlfriend, resulting in his arrest. The girlfriend was in a difficult state mentally after the incident and grew to hate Mumkey who called the police. She spread lies about him, saying he sleeps with his sister of whom he doesn’t have. People were going after him for that. Now both his friend and her girlfriend hate him.
He then received some news about his health. He has very bad blood pressure and is susceptible to heart attacks early on. Now he lost his dream job and the main source of income. This is some tough times for the creator and I urge you to ask YouTube to bring back Mumkey Jones. If you have the spare money you can donate to his Patreon at Patreon.com/Mumkey. Even if you don’t watch his content, if you like comedy on YouTube, this is something to stand for.
#SaveMumkeyJones
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