Muted on Arrival: Platform Suppression, Misrouting, and the Cost of Being Misunderstood.
There’s a difference between being silenced and being misheard. For Black creators, that distinction often gets blurred. We aren’t just dealing with deletion or demonetization—we’re grappling with algorithms that distort our work, mislabel our content, and misdirect our visibility.
Suppression isn’t always censorship in the traditional sense. It’s subtler than that. It shows up when paid campaigns underperform not because the content is weak, but because it’s being routed to the wrong audiences. It shows up when analytics say your video was discovered through an offensive or irrelevant search term. It shows up when, despite investing time, skill, and ad dollars, your work is algorithmically detoured into oblivion.
Take my experience. I run a channel focused on brand strategy, storytelling, and the intersection of culture and AI. One of my videos celebrated Coco Gauff’s brilliance and the emotional arc of her championship moment. But YouTube’s ad system tied my traffic to the search term “lil durk f*ck.” Not sports. Not culture. Not anything related to the video’s actual theme. That’s where my paid traffic was sent. And that’s not just bad targeting—it’s institutional misreading.
This wasn’t a one-off. Over time, I noticed a pattern: when I uploaded a new video, organic reach would collapse. The only way to get views was to boost it through Google Ads. But even then, the traffic was low-quality. My click-through rates were decent. My titles and thumbnails were strong. But retention was poor because the video was showing up in places it didn’t belong.
Meanwhile, YouTube’s own Inspiration tab recommended exactly the kind of content my videos align with. Their internal AI got it. So why didn’t the referral engine? Why was one part of the system reading me clearly while another part consistently misrouted me? That misalignment is the core of modern suppression.
This is the loop many of us are stuck in: Poor algorithmic placement leads to poor retention. Poor retention leads to lower visibility. Lower visibility pressures creators to use paid ads. Paid ads are misrouted, compounding poor performance. And the cycle continues.
That’s not a glitch. That’s a design flaw. Or worse—a design choice. The whole thing pissed me off so bad I hosted a talk about it and created a whole toolkit to fight it!
For creators of color, especially Black women, the cost of being misread is not just low views. It’s missed opportunities, skewed analytics, and wasted resources. It’s the emotional toll of knowing your work is good, but the system is rigged to misunderstand it. And when you try to seek support? You’re met with robotic responses, policy deflections, or worse—cases being mislabeled as unrelated violations, like election interference.
This is why we must push for platform accountability that goes beyond demonetization appeals. We need transparency in how content is classified, routed, and served. We need escalation paths that don’t reroute us into dead ends. And we need people behind the systems who understand the cultural context of our work.
Until meaningful changes are made, we document our experiences. We speak openly about what’s happening behind the scenes, especially when platforms try to dismiss our concerns as glitches or anomalies. We organize—not just in community, but across industries—because isolated voices can be ignored, but collective clarity is harder to silence.
We tell the truth. Even when it’s uncomfortable. Even when it makes people squirm. Because the only way to challenge a system designed to misread us is to confront it with undeniable, persistent truth.
And through it all, we remind each other: You are capable of big things. Even when the algorithm says otherwise. Even when the platforms distort your voice. Your visibility may be throttled—but your power is not.
