The YouTube Purge: Saving BrawnyAi and the Hidden Cost of Censorship
Hey everyone, B here. 👋
Being a full-time content creator in the digital hunk and AI space is a constant, uphill battle. While I love building the Lumberlandia universe, the reality of navigating social media algorithms is incredibly draining. Recently, we hit a wall that almost cost us everything.
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You can also listen to the Season 2 Episode 3 Podcast about the YouTube Purge.
A few weeks ago, the BrawnyAi YouTube channel—which has grown to almost 70,000 followers—was on the absolute brink of being permanently deleted. Out of nowhere, the automated systems began flagging our content. I received strikes for videos that simply featured our guys fully dressed in red plaid shirts and jeans, which the platform inexplicably categorized as explicit pornography.
Still receiving emails about removal of BrawnyAi videos.
When you are dealing with these massive platforms, there is practically zero human recourse. I realized that I was one automated strike away from losing years of hard work completely. To survive, I had to make the gut-wrenching decision to delete all of our YouTube Shorts. It felt like amputating an arm just to save the rest of the body.
Messages of what you see when you receive a strike.
But there is a much bigger tragedy here than just lost views or a frustrating week. A lot of these deleted shorts utilized the earliest iterations of AI video technology. As these big platforms force creators to scrub their older archives to comply with shifting, arbitrary rules, we are actively erasing the history of how AI video technology came to be. We are losing the time capsule of our progress.
Details of what the email from YouTube says about the strike.
It is incredibly exhausting to pour resources, time, and stress into this art, only to have an automated system threaten to tear it all down.
But we survived. And because I had to pull all of those videos down from the public eye, I am bringing them directly to you.
For my incredible 💪MightyPros, your support is what keeps this universe independent and safe from algorithms. I am dropping an exclusive archive of 50 of these recovered videos right into the Secret Vault for you today.
For my MightyBrawnies, I am sharing a hand-picked selection of these videos directly in this newsletter below.
As for the remaining 850+ videos from the archive, I am keeping them safe and will figure out exactly how to share them with you at another time.
Thank you for standing by me through the chaos and the content creator battles. We are still here, and we are moving forward.
With love ❤️,
B
A Look Back: The BrawnyAi Time Capsule
These 50 videos are a true time capsule of BrawnyAi’s very beginning. Pulled directly from the archive of shorts I just had to remove from YouTube, they represent the earliest work you can experience of this brand. Three years ago, AI video technology was practically non-existent, so most of these shorts are built using creative slideshows and effects—though there is one rare video hidden in this batch that actually uses some of the earliest AI video tech available! While my full archive of unpublished early experiments is much larger, I wanted to share these 50 specific videos to give you a real sense of how our digital hunks looked back then and how far our art has evolved today. If you are on the free tier, you can enjoy a selection of these videos right below, or you can try to scroll all the way back to the dawn of my Instagram page to find them. However, if you want to skip the endless scrolling and conveniently own this piece of history, you can upgrade to a 💪MightyPro membership today and download the complete 50-video drop instantly.
