I don't know how long the feature has been on YouTube, but it might be relatively recent. And that's the feature of shadow-banning comments. Quite egregiously (well, depending on your personal perspective, I suppose) channel authors can affect this shadow-banning.
"Shadow-banning" means that your content is secretly and silently censored behind the scenes in such a way that you yourself still see it completely normally, without any indication that something has been done to it, but it will be hidden from everybody else so that they won't see it.
YouTube has at some point implemented this for the comment section of videos (something that people, including myself, have corroborated via extensive testing): If your comment gets shadow-banned, YouTube will still show it to you as normal, as if it had been successfully uploaded and is there for everybody to see, but it will be hidden from everybody else (something that you can corroborate by viewing the comment section while not logged in, which can be easily done with a browser's private window, or another browser.)
More egregiously, channel owners can mark certain words and expressions to be shadow-banned: Anybody who writes a comment containing any of those words (no matter what the comment is about, even if it's completely innocuous and positive) will have that comment silently and secretly shadow-banned.
Shadow-banning in general is ethically questionable. That's because it's inherently deceptive. It's deceitful and dishonest, it's essentially lying to the user: Effectively the website is showing the user "yes, your content is completely ok, exists here as normal, and is being shown to everybody as normal", which in this case is a complete lie. It's lying to the user, deceiving the user into thinking that everything is find and there's nothing wrong about his content, while secretly behind the scenes censoring said content without telling the user.
Or, in other words, the user is being gaslighted: Made to believe that everything is fine with what he did, when in fact behind the scenes everything is not find.
It's also arguably against a the core principles of a just society. In such a society with a fair justice system, if you do something wrong you will be explained in detail what you did wrong and why, and any actions done as a consequence of your wrongdoing will be completely transparent and likewise made very clear to you. In an unjust corrupted society if you do something against the rules, those in power will not tell you, will keep you in the dark, and put you in a secret hidden list that will be used to discriminate against you in some manner, without ever telling you that's even the case. In other words, you will be punished without ever telling you why you are being punished, or even that you are deliberately being punished in the first place (ie. you might experience discrimination in some manner in some situations without knowing it's a consequence of this kind of secret behind-the-scenes punishment.)
While shadow-banning YouTube comments may not be that bad and egregious, it's still in principle the same thing: You are not told that you did something wrong, you are not told what it is that you did wrong, and you are secretly censored behind the scenes while trying to keep you oblivious to that censorship happening behind the scenes, actively trying to hide the censorship from you. You are being punished without telling you why, or even that some kind of punishment is happening in the first place.
How can someone learn from his mistakes and do better in the future if he's not even told that he did something wrong, much less what the wrong thing was? How can someone learn from his mistakes when he isn't even being told that he is being punished for those mistakes?
And on that note, the ability for channel owners to create a list of banned words, these words being used to shadow-ban every comment that contains any of those words, is a huge double-edged sword.
And that's, of course, because it will almost invariably cause a huge amount of "false positives": Completely innocent innocuous positive comments being flagged for shadow-banning, just because those comments contained a forbidden word.
It has indeed been clearly demonstrated that YouTube doesn't even try to make any kind of distinction between such comments, doesn't even try to take context and the rest of the comment into account. It's fully automatic and blunt: If the comment contains such a word, it gets automatically shadow-banned completely regardless of what the comment actually was about.
And, indeed, there are plenty of documented examples out there about YouTube channel owners adding completely asinine common-use words to their shadow-banning lists, which are extremely likely to cause false positives. They are not merely adding things like nasty swearwords, racial slurs, words that are only used in scams, etc. Many of these authors are adding very common everyday words that can be, and most often are, used completely legitimately and innocently.
(Although to be fair: That list of banned words doesn't just shadow-ban the comments and that's it. Instead, it also puts them in a list that the channel owner can see and proceed to flag such comments as OK to be published, after which they become unbanned. And for smaller channels with authors who actually care about comment moderation that's fine: They have more control over what kind of comments will appear and which won't. However, for larger channels that may receive literally thousands of comments in mere minutes after publication, it's unlikely that the channel owner will start go though each one. There are also owners who simply don't care and never browse through that list or do anything to those comments.)
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