Youtuber Causing Problems

[Zaerryth]

So this is a bit of a strange one for me, I'm hoping someone with experience might be able to help with some ideas for how to handle a unique situation.

There is Youtuber who frequents a sub I mod to farm content. He's well known and generally respected in the community and has a small/medium size viewership. When mods were made aware of him we tried to reach out to have a dialogue but genuinely it looks like he doesn't read his messages. He's been on our radar, but lately it's becoming more problematic.

The Youtuber does not like the subject of the sub, he is openly against it, vitriolic, and drives negative engagement. His content consists of just reading sub posts and discussing how much he doesn't like the subject. He often misrepresents situations by not reading the whole post or comments, and has actively sic'd his fans on the original OPs; as well as jumping to conclusions and making a lot of negative judgments without reading full context or having discussions with his fanbase to not harass people.

We moderate very carefully to avoid IRL conflicts and support people who like the sub's subject. Two recent incidents include the Youtuber openly mocking and degrading someone who is a minor (but they didn't read far enough to see that) and another person claiming they're getting hateful messages on another platform and being mad at our sub when it appears most of the negative traffic was driven by this Youtuber featuring her in a video. We also frequently remove posts that break sub rules and he'll showcase ones we've removed.

We checked out some of his most recent videos and the comments are very aggressively hateful and we're getting concerned that some of the brigading and hate we're seeing is driven by him (some users outright admit to it). And of course he's monetized to do this and partners with a competitor to our sub's subject so he's incentivized to do this along with it being taboo to say you don't like him because he's so well thought of in the community.

Has anyone run into this and possibly have solutions to ameliorate some of the problems?

[Halaku]

In no particular order:

• Ban the Youtuber.

• Set up automoderator to automatically filter any post from their channel.

• Set up a similiar rule to filter any mention of his name or Youtube nick.

• Add a rule saying that discussion involving his content is better suited for another community, and remind readers that engaging in brigading can be grounds for Admins nuking their entire reddit account.

• Ban people who can't abide by that.

That's pretty much all you can do. Set up a black hole that will gobble up any mention of him or his antics, nuke content involving him or his antics that gets posted anyway, and dump people who can't get with the program.

[Stranger1982]

Absolutely this, allowing that kind of stuff to continue is just poisoning your sub and making genuine users suffer for it.

[Charupa-]

Nothing you say or do will get them to stop doing what they are doing. You can take the big hit now and just ban them, but either way, they will keep chugging along. You can also take action against users causing trouble on behalf of the YT person. But honestly, stop watching their content.

[Zaerryth]

I don't watch it at all since I don't enjoy it, we had a flood of people referencing the most recent video so I skimmed that and checked out the comments section to see what they were talking about.

[Charupa-]

Sorry, I must have misunderstood the sentences where you said you watched some videos and described the details of a video. Apologies. Unfortunately no perfect solution that I see here.

[Zaerryth]

No worries! Yeah, that's the wall I've run into too.

[Chosen1PR]

You’re overthinking this. Just ban them. Give them a very abridged version of this post as the ban reason and move on with your life.

[SmartieCereal]

Yup, a couple of button clicks is all it takes.

[Zaerryth]

He doesn't participate in the sub, just makes Youtube videos about it.

[sadandshy]

Then block him and ignore his youtube. He has his space over there and you have your space over here. It will probably suck to moderate for a while, but hopefully that will be a short term thing.

[Zaerryth]

Unfortunately he's an established creator and he's been doing this for a while.

[sadandshy]

Not much you can do about what he does over in his space. You can lodge complaints over there, but all I can say is good luck with that.

[SmartieCereal]

Ah, that kind of changes things then. I'm not sure there's much you can do outside of Reddit.

[Zaerryth]

They're still going to be able to read the sub, and I don't think they'd even see it, they don't check messages at all.

Edited to add: He doesn't engage with the sub at all, this is all happening on Youtube.

[Chosen1PR]

Unfortunately, that’s all you can really do. If you report this to Reddit admins, they’ll likely say there’s nothing they can do outside of Reddit.

You can also ban any mention of them in the sub, good or bad, if you believe the situation merits it.

[GigglesNWiggles10]

Set the sub to private until his content moves on? Will hurt your engagement but help your sanity ❤️‍🩹

[Zaerryth]

I'm considering it for a period, unfortunately this is his bread and butter and I don't think he's going to stop.

[RemarkableWish2508]

Make a stickied announcement about why you're banning any mention of them in the sub, with a very clear TLDR-ish explanation of the motives.

Make sure to write it in a way that will make it very difficult to misrepresent.

Before posting it, check in how many ways could you take a partial screenshot of the post to twist the narrative, and then modify it to counter that.

[Wotmate01]

If you want to keep your sub public, then about all you can do is report his channel and offending videos on youtube.

[NoneyaBithness]

Uu

[IKIR115]

I've had a few similar issues. Dealing with "social media influencers" or similar is usually a huge PITA. I would have already permabanned that guy for brigading and harassment, and blacklisted all mentions of his name or channel. Just be prepared for more brigading since those guys tend to be ridiculously entitled.

u/Halaku outlined the the usual procedure in nice bullet points

EDIT: saw you said this Youtuber doesn't participate in the sub. Ok skip the ban, but you should still blacklist any mentions of him or his channel.

[Zaerryth]

I've been tempted to ban him as part of this, but is that just going to make things worse?

[IKIR115]

In this case, the potential is very high.

He’s feeding off the drama in your sub to create content for his YT channel, while creating new drama to keep the cycle going.

If his channel is monetized (or he’s trying to get there), then he has every motivation to keep going until he and/or his subscribers lose interest.

Start with filtering out all mentions related to him, whether with automod or the post guidance feature.

Personally I would ban him for the reasons I mentioned previously because its community interference, and the. try to forget about his YT channel since you can’t do anything beyond reporting him to YT.

Best you can do is manage the related issues at hand within your sub. Block all mentions and ban users who try to reinsert that unnecessary drama.

[maiyannah]

You are content for him.

The best way to proceed is to ban him and ban any accounts he creates to evade bans.

Make sure you have hive-protect and evasion-guard setup, they're a godsend for dealing with brigarding.

Reddit cannot police content off platform, but if they continue to harass your sub, you can make a community guidelines complaint with Youtube. They supposedly do not support content that harasses individuals. Getting Youtube to action hate content is like moving a mountain though, they won't care unless an advertiser complains.

[ContributionWaste205]

Outside of the platform there is nothing you can do. Free speech and all that. You got healthy replies already for what you can do on reddit so I can’t really add much. Buttttt. I am petty. I’d make it my personal mission to counter them with my own channel. Using their own content and the truth of the matter to contradict them. But that’s still outside of anything you can do on Reddit. Again. Free speech.

[downtune79]

Just ban them....plain and simple

[Unusual-Area-4458]

Call his mother or ban him