> "I’ve watched enough Mark Dice videos to know how bad it is" is an appeal to authority first
That's not what appeal to authority is. You should read the Wikipedia article on that one again (Note: I learned about fallacies not from Wikipedia but from a very old professor who was a Chinese dissident, and I had a 4.0 in that course). The statement in parenthesis was an appeal to authority. I was referring to the times he posted screenshots and videos of search results being manipulated, or his own videos being demonetized with manual review, or if you searched his name at one point you got no video results. At the time, you could do the search yourself and reproduce the results. I don't know how you can get any better than that save a Snowden-esque leak from big tech, and I'm sure you guys will find a way to label one of those a hoax.
The premise of that argument wasn't even centered on the question of the scale of the manipulation itself, but rather a rebuttal to the argument that "only the uploader will know about the censorship". There's a saying, "who are you going to believe, the media, or your lying eyes?"
One person's eyes, vis-a-vis search results, are an absolute drop in the ocean and never indicative of how the actual system works or the common experience of an end-user. "Look how they're censoring us" can be anything from explicit policy to user-specific configuration based on past history to an unexpected consequence of other features minimizing access to some unrelated data to the information being shared on a site that is also acting as an active persistent threat to a datacenter or storage / processing cluster dropping offline for a few hours.
If one trusts screenshots and videos because Mark Dice shared them, it's an appeal to (bad) authority. If one tries to armchair-analyze them without a lot of both grounding in the space and insider knowledge, one is extremely likely to arrive at untrue conclusions not only about the motivations of the people operating the system but the actual behavior of the system itself.
In Dice's case, regarding demonetization, if I were to wild-ass guess from glancing at his content: YouTube doesn't display the "dislike" signal any more, but it still consumes the signal as both algorithm sampling and a soft-trigger for manual review (and potentially an auto-trigger for demonetize-now-review-later). And the "Report" button is still there, and there are no consequences for reporting videos that are later decided to not be TOS violations (that I'm aware of).
Dice's problems can be explained by the kind of simple brigading that happens to controversial figures all the time. In terms of monetization, YouTube is a very (small-c) conservative platform, and lots of people from all sides of the political aisle have been migrating away from it, not because of its political bias, but because it's a damn slot machine for anyone trying to make a living.
(TBF: Google et. al. could possibly minimize a lot of this controversy by being far more transparent about the special sauce. OTOH, I don't know in the current political climate if that would be useful because I don't know if their explanations would be believed. "Who are you going to believe, Google, or your lying eyes", right?)
That's not what appeal to authority is. You should read the Wikipedia article on that one again (Note: I learned about fallacies not from Wikipedia but from a very old professor who was a Chinese dissident, and I had a 4.0 in that course). The statement in parenthesis was an appeal to authority. I was referring to the times he posted screenshots and videos of search results being manipulated, or his own videos being demonetized with manual review, or if you searched his name at one point you got no video results. At the time, you could do the search yourself and reproduce the results. I don't know how you can get any better than that save a Snowden-esque leak from big tech, and I'm sure you guys will find a way to label one of those a hoax.
The premise of that argument wasn't even centered on the question of the scale of the manipulation itself, but rather a rebuttal to the argument that "only the uploader will know about the censorship". There's a saying, "who are you going to believe, the media, or your lying eyes?"