I have placed well over 680 videos on this channel, free of charge, no advertising. I never asked you once, in any of my videos, to like the video, to share the video, to favorite the video, to subscribe to my channel, or to comment on the video. I never interpolated you, never forced you to act in any way, never pleaded with you.
But now I'm asking you to do all this, and I'm asking you to do all this, to fight back, to push back against the sinister, one could even say evil misconduct, of platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Let me go a bit into details and place it in the context of history and societal trends.
If you go to my new Instagram account, narcissismwithvaknin, my penultimate post is about YouTube.
Swipe left, there are three photos, three images there. You can see in the first image that YouTube used to recommend each of my videos to an average of 5 million users. Then in the next image, the number drops from 5 million to 2 million, and in the last image, the number drops to 90,000 people, 90,000 users instead of 5 million.
Why is that? Why is YouTube recommending my videos, my new videos, my videos in the past 2-3 months, 4 months? Why is it recommending these videos to fewer than 100,000 people when it used to recommend my videos to millions of people before? What had happened?
I made a mistake. I made the mistake of criticizing the way governments all over the world mishandled the COVID pandemic. I made the mistake of calling out Black Lives Matter, MeToo and Far Right groups for psychopathic conduct. I even cited studies which demonstrate conclusively that most activists are covert psychopaths or grandiose narcissists. I called out fake gurus, one of the coaches, self-styled experts online, and the nonsense they disseminate.
And above all, I exposed the pernicious movement of covert narcissists who call themselves empaths. I made all these mistakes. I made all these mistakes of telling the truth as I saw it, of course. I have no monopoly on the truth. I may well be mistaken on each and every of these issues and not claiming to be God. Well, not on YouTube at least.
But I have a right to say what I think. If I substantiate it with studies, with information, with data, I never say any sentence in any of my videos, not backed by a panoply and plethora of academic research.
So Facebook is more of a thuggish psychopath. They act aggressively and violently. They simply deleted most of my pages on Facebook and they denied me access to my erstwhile, my first Instagram account. My first Instagram account is Vaknin Sam.
Sam Narcissist. Vaknin Sam Narcissist. And it's available online and you can see that I hadn't posted since May. And I hadn't posted since May because they cut me off. They disallowed my access.
And at the same time, they reduced the dissemination of my posts on Facebook. No one sees them anymore. That's Facebook style. Facebook style is the equivalent of a psychopath.
YouTube is more like a passive aggressive covert narcissist. YouTube now no longer shows my videos in search results. You don't have to trust me. Go online and search for narcissism. No Vaknin insight. After you scroll down to 300 results, you may find a single video of mine.
And to remind you, my channel was the first channel of narcissism on YouTube. I have well over 30 million views on a single channel. I've educated generations of coaches and experts and so on and so forth. They're using my work and yet I'm nowhere to be found on YouTube search results.
YouTube is now not recommending my videos anymore except to users who have spent months watching other channels on narcissism.
Then if you have spent months watching other channels on narcissism, you will finally come across one of my videos.
Some people had written to me to tell me that they had spent four to six years watching only videos about narcissism and never heard of me, never came across a video of mine.
And as you can see, my on my Instagram account, narcissism with Vaknin, Instagram narcissism with Vaknin. As you can see, my latest post had been recommended to fewer than 93,000 users compared to an average of 2 million users before I started talking openly about the egregious misconduct of numerous other people on YouTube.
Ironically, at the same time, the number of subscribers to my channel had shot up from 85,000 to 135,000. So views on my videos plummeted by 89%.
I repeat the shocking number. Views on my new videos have plummeted by 89% compared to my old videos.
Even as the number of my subscribers went up by 70%, that's 70%. Even worse, there is something called click through rate. Click through rate or CTR is how many people click on the video when they see it in the recommended videos list.
So you see a recommended video. If you click on it, you add to the CTR. You increase the CTR. My CTR has doubled.
I want you to understand this. Twice as many users click on my videos on the rare occasions that these videos are recommended.
Users are twice more interested in my videos than they used to be in the old days. My new videos are much more popular than my old videos. People want to watch them twice as much.
YouTube is denying them this right. YouTube is deleting my videos from recommended list, suggested videos, search results, denying people the possibility and opportunity to be exposed to my views.
They can reject my views. They can reject me as a person. It's not a problem. This is plurality. This is diversity. This is the foundation of democracy and even free markets. Disagreement is the glue that binds us all together. Not agreement. Agreement you have in Nazi Germany. Agreement you have in Stalinist Russia.
In the West, we should have disagreement and conflict as the founding, the cornerstones.
And yet YouTube is homogenizing. It's not only telling you what to see, but making sure that you keep watching the same thing again and again. This is as close to brainwashing as I can conceive.
YouTube is brainwashing you. Simple, plain and simple.
They make sure that you watch identical content on multiple channels time and again. And they make sure that you are not exposed to opposing points of view and countervailing information.
YouTube is fostering confirmation bias, which is a pathology.
These platforms, their monopolies, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, they have become monopolies. There are no real alternatives to YouTube.
Bichute is tiny. It's clunky. Most of the time it's not working. There are billions of dollars of investment in the infrastructure of these mammals, of these animal beasts, of information technology, of these social media. They are monopolies. There's no way anyone can take them on.
And yet as monopolies, they have severely undermined free speech. These companies should be regulated. They should be penalized and they should be broken up as the trusts that they are. They are cartels. They are trusts. Their conduct is illegal. The current egregious misconduct is a dictatorship, a technocracy. The unelected and unqualified few at the management of YouTube, at the management of Facebook and at the management of Twitter, they decide. They decide. Armed with dumb artificial intelligence softwares, they are muzzling. They are silencing. They are censoring. They are circling anyone who dares to call the truth as they see it. They are cutting off anyone who doesn't tow their party line to maximum profits. They are profit oriented and free speech is bad for profit.
I repeat, free speech is bad for profits.
If you are intimate with your wife, if you give time to your children, you take time away from Facebook and YouTube. They don't want that. They don't want you to have a family. They don't want you to have friends. They don't want you to spend a minute outside the ecosphere, the sick ecosphere that they had constructed for you. They want you to be a slave and so they condition you. They get you addicted in a variety of nefarious, pernicious, sinister ways.
I have spoken about it many times in many interviews and many videos.
These enterprises are evil. They are evil. They are menace. End of story. They should be confronted. They should be reformed. And if all else fails, they should be taken down.
We are better off without them.
All these platforms are treating us as though we were adolescents. And you know what? We are reacting to their mistreatment as though we were adolescents. We don't matter. We don't react as adults would when their freedoms are constricted. We don't rebel.
One of the main functions of a shared fantasy is to project to the world a facade of normalcy and equally to self-delude the narcissist that he is all but normal.
Shared fantasy is a simulacrum. It's a very similar attitude. It's a fake pretension that everything is normal. Everything is okay.
And the disintegration of the shared fantasy exposes the narcissist and other people to the harsh reality.
The narcissist is mentally ill and his family or his firm are precariously balanced houses of cars.
And this is where the likes of YouTube and Facebook and so on come in. They are riding the wave of rising narcissism, rising grandiosity, the tsunami of entitlement.
They foster, they enhance, they amplify, they encourage your narcissism. They want you to be mentally ill.
As humanity is becoming increasingly more grandiose and more entitled, puberty is extended well into one's twenties.
These are studies by Twenge and Campbell starting in 2008.
And so we have boomerang kids. They live with their parents and they continue their interminable education so-called well into the fatties.
Well into the fatties, infantile, wannabe adults, failures at being grownups, marriage, sex, childbearing are distant memories.
Watch my video about sexless youth in today's world. These are distant memories because they are adult chores.
They are adult responsibilities to get married, to create a family, to bring children to the world and even to have adult reciprocal sex. That's adult. That's an adult thing. We don't want to grow up. We don't want to grow up.
And the social media platforms are taking advantage of this. They infantilize us on purpose. It's a design feature. It's not an accident. These platforms were constructed this way to regress you, to infantilize you, to create dependence the same way a baby depends on his mother because he needs to be seen by the mother in order to survive.
Even computers and the internet at large, not only social media, reflect these trends. They nanny us. They discipline us.
I'll talk about nanny computing in a minute.
Not only do we all refuse to grow up, not only do we all refuse to assume adult chores and responsibility, not only do we all end up as Peter Pan's, the Peter Pan syndrome, where I terms the eternal adolescent, but we elect pure, real adolescent leaders who cater to our pathological needs.
And we use technologies that keep us in a state of arrested development, technologies that assume the role of parents and not just any parents, sadistic, harsh, disciplinarian, abusive parents, because that's the way Facebook and YouTube and so on are behaving nowadays.
As bad, dead parents, not as good enough parents, Winnicott would have been appalled.
The more we refuse to grow up, the more we will be at the mercy of these technologies.
Postmodern, post-industrial civilization is one gigantic shared fantasy and the pandemic has therefore led to global mortification because every shared fantasy ends with injury, narcissistic injury or narcissistic mortification.
The shared fantasy that we call Western civilization, which had now become global civilization, this shared fantasy has ended. It's over, it's dead.
And so we are all mortified in social media platforms, in a wicked, intentional, deliberate way, are leveraging our vulnerability at the time of mortification to penetrate our minds into nothing short of brainwash and enslavers.
We are reacting to this mortification, the pandemic mortification.
As all adolescents do, we look for our missing parents and the social media step in as these missing parents.
Some of us deny reality and we try to continue with the old normal. We try to hover previous partners, individual partners, institutional partners. We try to go back. We try to regress nostalgically to previous periods and eras in our lives or in the history of humanity.
It's a shattered shared fantasy and we are all mortified.
And yet we are all looking for a way back, a way out.
And here comes social media and they pretend, they lie about having the solution. And so they make us believe that we are connected. We are not, social media is anti-social media. It's utterly psychopathic and narcissistic. And it's covert because you don't realize what's being done to you. You don't realize how poisoned you, how they poisoned you, how toxic they are.
And some of us rebel against these parental figures.
And if we are not mature enough, we're not intelligent enough, we become anti-social, defiant, impulsive, callous and reckless.
But these are the outliers. The majority of us, we are cowed into unthinking submission, a type of conformity common to adolescents faced with a threat.
When an adolescent is faced with the consequences and the outcomes of his misconduct, he recoils, he becomes submissive, he becomes subservient, obsequious, obeying, accepting.
Adolescents are cowards, like all bullies, like all narcissists, you know, faced with a threat, faced with the consequences of their actions, they submit.
Social media know that. And so they treat you as harsh parents would, confronting you with threats, censorship, all kinds of inbuilt surveillance technologies which render, which leave you no place to turn to, no place to run.
I mean, there used to be a series in the 1960s. It was called The Prisoner. There was this guy on an island and it was a surveillance penal system. It was a surveillance prison. Wherever he tried to go on the island, he was followed. He was photographed. He didn't have where to escape. There was no escape. There's no escaping these technologies.
They had intruded totally into your lives. It's a surveillance society. They know everything about you. They can shame you. They can embarrass you. They can humiliate you. They can take away your job. They can destroy your lives.
And it's there, like a democracy or in the offing, you know, you misbehave. We will show you who is the boss.
So don't upload videos like this one because you'll be penalized. Don't dare to go against money making channels. Don't undermine our profit centers. Don't insult any specific group of people.
And the list is endless.
Literally, you can't insult anyone.
YouTube number one, of course, you can't insult YouTube.
This is not my first video criticizing YouTube. You can't find the other one. And I'm going to annex it. I'm going to try to add it to the end of this video. Again, re-upload it, flying in the face of the previous decision to delete it.
Ubiquitous computing is becoming not only intrusive, but also more condescending, more patronizing. Each version is more pervasive more supervisory, more controlling than the other one. I call it nanny computing.
Underlying nanny softwares are the twin assumptions that people are way too stupid to be entrusted with their own welfare and critical thinking, that people are so irrational that they never get anything right, that they have to be spoon fed, that their decision making process is compromised.
Nanny computing, ubiquitous computing, as it is embedded integrally in the fabric of social media, is the most humiliating slap in the face of humanity.
Because these people are telling you, you are too retarded to make up your own mind. We're going to make up your mind for you. If I want your opinion, I will give it to you. I've made up my mind. Don't confuse me with the facts.
Nanny apps, nanny software programs, nanny social media, they override, they override the user's explicit choices, preferences, commands, and access to information.
And this is reminiscent of Hull, the onboard computer in the starship in the famous movie, dystopian movie Odyssey 2001. Hull took over the ship and wouldn't let go and disobeyed his ostensibly, allegedly human masters.
Nanny computing is the only manifestation of a social trend that is at least 150 years old when the first welfare nanny state was established by Bismarck in Germany. And nanny computing now, goes hand in hand with a nanny state and hand in hand with artificial intelligence.
Elon Musk and many others had warned that artificial intelligence at some point will plant us, will replace us as the dominant species on earth. And social media are the harbingers of this trend because they put artificial intelligence above their users. They subject their users to the decisions of artificial intelligence. We are the slaves.
When you go on YouTube, you are immediately the slave, the client of an artificial software program, whether you know it or not, you're in the hands of an artificial intelligence software. And that software will decide what you're going to see, what you're going to hear, what you're allowed and not allowed to say in your comments, etc.
And there are harsh penalties. If you transgress against this artificial intelligence software, this software has power over you and you are powerless and helpless in the face of this software co-opted by smattering of humans and by the nanny state.
People are infantilized. They are regressed forcefully, sinisterly, wickedly into an earlier dependent stage of personal development.
One's agency and one's self-efficacy are usurped by authorities of all kinds, religious authorities, secular authorities, or worse, technological authorities because at least the secular authorities, they're elected. Religious authorities have direct contact with God. Technological authorities have nothing but the bottom line.
Social media are the latest examples of such. It is for your own good coercion.
But social media were preceded by numerous other instances of nanny attitude, including prohibition. You shall not drink alcohol. It's not good for you.
The criminalization of psychoactive substances like drugs. Drugs are not good for you. Just say no, even if you want to say yes.
The COVID-19 pandemic cast this pernicious mindset and paternalism into sharp relief.
We have never been so denuded of basic rights. Never. It's a coup. It's a global coup.
Now, many of these steps are medically justified. Right now they were not. Right now they are.
But there is a way to reach consensus, negotiated consensus, and to establish a society-wide pattern of altruistic collaboration and cooperation and so on. It was not done this way. It was imposed. You were coerced. It was a threat.
Uniformity, conformity, and predictability are crucial to the functioning of modern mass economies. Individualism had become a threat to be constrained.
Grandiose-defined narcissism is actually the revolt of the masses, the revolt of all of you, as you recoil from the deadening embrace of those who know best what's good for you.
Now, the more you deny voice to people, the more you foster informant, unrest, and rebellion.
Social media are driving all of us to the abyss because they are denying voice to a sizable minority, and in some cases majority.
These people who can't post on YouTube can't post on Facebook, can't post on Instagram. They are going to break furniture and do worse things because they have no other option.
Free speech, the only alternative to free speech is violence. We should have learned at least this lesson from the last 100 years.
I'm going to try to merge this video with the one that's been eliminated long ago. It's a video, I think, from April or something, where I criticized YouTube for its policies. I don't think they liked it too much. And I don't think they're going to like this one too much.
So please share, favorite, like, subscribe, and comment on this video. Only on this video. I'm never going to ask you again because it's important to get the word out. It's important to get the word out, and it's important to start a movement or at least individual resistance, peaceful resistance, to social media.
They are the enemy.
Yesterday, YouTube started to delete my videos on COVID-19, the pandemic.
Not one of my videos contains any conspiracy theory. I have spent my entire adult life fighting off conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and other nonsense. All the information in my videos has been thoroughly vetted and researched. Some of it had become obsolete. Some of it had been proven wrong by time and accrued knowledge.
Then I took pains to correct this information in future videos. My videos are academic. They are stable and solid.
It seems that what I had done to deserve this mistreatment by YouTube is that I dared to disagree with the dogma of universal social distancing.
Many mainstream medical experts agree with me, actually. They also say that universal social distancing is a bad idea and that it would lead to a second wave of infections, which will be far more deleterious and dangerous than the first one because the population will not have developed herd immunity.
Actually, quite a few countries, such as Sweden, United Kingdom until recently, numerous other countries in Africa and Asia, they don't have social distancing. They have tracing. They have testing. They have many things. They protect their vulnerable populations, but they don't have social distancing.
But it seems that if you dare to question the policies of the administration or more precisely the healthcare establishment in the United States, it is a sufficient basis nowadays for heavy-handed authoritarian censorship.
YouTube is a monopolistic utility. It is a private company, technically speaking, but it controls such a big chunk of the video upload market that it should be regulated as a monopoly.
Monopolies are not allowed by law, by constitutional law, to censor speech. YouTube had numerous other options at its disposal.
One idea, YouTube could have added a disclaimer to flag videos that it deems inaccurate, misleading, or dangerous.
Instead, YouTube chose the reprehensible path of the most unsavory regimes in human history.
YouTube chose to muzzle dissent and to digitally execute its barriers.
This may be the most long-lasting damage of this pandemic, which is abating.
The reversal of human and civil liberties hard-won over centuries with bloodshed.
YouTube's egregious misbehavior is exactly what gives birth to conspiracy theories, the very conspiracy theories that YouTube claims to be suppressing.
If one looks at YouTube's behavior, one is compelled to ask, what gives? Who do we know? What is this happening? Could it have anything to do with the fact that Google is a major beneficiary, economic, financial beneficiary of a pandemic, about to receive massive contact tracing contracts? And if this is true, and of course it's mere speculation, then who can we trust? If our information purveyors suppress utterly legitimate speech, not conspiracy theories, not misinformation, utterly legitimate speech, who can we trust and why this is happening?
We gave rise to the Church of COVID-19. It's a new religion, and like every religion, it has its doctrines, it has its dogmas, and it has its saints.
Dr. Fauci is a saint, Dr. Birx is such a saint. Like in other religions, other nascent religions, like in other young religions, if you dare to question the saints or the dogma, you're beheaded.
This is exactly what happens to people who dare to question the dogma or its couriers, its messengers.
It's a slippery slope, it's a dangerous path towards the suppression of speech, the free speech, regarding other issues.
Because if today you suppress free speech regarding a health care issue, tomorrow you may be suppressing political speech, and the day after you may be suppressing oral speech.
In dictatorial regimes throughout history, even the most extreme dictator didn't start by suppressing the entirety of speech. Even the most extreme dictators in history started by suppressing specific speech, anti-nation speech directed against the nation, speech directed against the majority and for certain minorities, a speech that doubted government policies.
Gradually, there was an erosion, incremental salami type, you know, sausage. And at the end of which, people discover to their shock and amazement that they can't say anything without the prior approval of the state. And if they fail to obtain it, they find themselves in very, very dark places.
All my videos are still available, mysteriously, on my other channel on YouTube, which is Vaknin Musings. Vaknin, like my name, V-A-K-N-I-N, Musings, M-U-S-I-N-G-S. One word, Vaknin Musings.
There's a link to the Vaknin Musings channel on my main channel. So if you look at, like, recommended channels or something like that, you will see a link to this channel there. All the videos are still available there. I don't know for how long. Thank you.