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Does YouTube block some videos from searches?

Here’s an odd thing:

For the past few months, a 2014 Risk Bites video on nanoscale silver has been getting hundreds of views a day — up from 30 – 50 views per day pre-coronavirus. Yet between May 7 – May 9, views from YouTube searches dropped from over 200 per day to zero.

Has the video somehow been blacklisted by YouTube?

It’s almost as if the video has been wiped from the YouTube search engine. Before May 9, it was one of the top ranked videos when searching for nanoscale silver. Now, it’s nearly impossible to find it.

I’ve not seen this behavior before, and I’m at a loss to explain it. I’ve tried tweaking the video title and keywords, but to no avail.

Which makes me wonder if there’s a YouTube algorithm that buries videos that some AI decides are misleading or divisive …

Not that this video is. To the contrary, it’s one of the few videos on YouTube that provides an evidence-based perspective on the benefits and risks of nanoscale silver and colloidal silver.

Unless somehow the colloidal silver have found a way of nobbling it. Not that I’m paranoid …


Update 6/20/20 – looks like the video is now being picked up in searches. It looks very much like the video was flagged as having inappropriate or misleading content, and was taken out of the search pool while it was checked out. I can’t find documentation of YouTube doing this, but I can’t think of many other explanations for the period where the video simply disappeared off the search map!

By Andrew Maynard

Andrew Maynard is a scientist, author, and one of the nation’s leading thinkers on socially responsible and ethical innovation.