The Attack on Occupy’s Legacy and the Fight Against Digital Censorship
For over 15 years, I have been documenting the pulse of America’s protest movements — from Occupy Wall Street to labor struggles and beyond. My YouTube channel, a carefully built archive of raw footage, interviews, and moments of resistance, was deleted without warning. Fifteen years of history—gone in an instant.
The timing couldn’t be more suspicious. The deletion happened the day after I updated my videos’ SEO settings to increase their visibility on Google and YouTube. Shortly after, I received notice that my entire channel was removed for “severe or repeated violations” of YouTube’s spam and deceptive practices policies. This accusation is false. I have never spammed, scammed, or deceived.
This is not merely an isolated technical glitch. It is a direct attack by Big Tech’s AI moderation systems — weaponized to silence voices that challenge entrenched powers. Google’s automated bots erased a vast trove of protest history because algorithms flagged activism as spam. They don’t just censor content; they erase collective memory.
This digital erasure threatens the very foundations of social movements. How can we learn from history if the record is wiped clean? How can future generations understand the sacrifices and struggles of those who came before if their stories disappear overnight?
Big Data corporations and AI gatekeepers wield monopoly control over our digital lives. Their unchecked power allows them to rewrite history by deleting inconvenient content and punishing dissent. The political class—millions of lobbyists and officials in Congress—have done nothing meaningful to hold these tech giants accountable. Instead, they enable the consolidation of power that leads to suppression.
But this is not my first rodeo. Yahoo’s similar purge in 2006 erased a lifetime of digital work, and I rebuilt then — and I will rebuild now. The fight against digital censorship is long and ongoing, rooted in an age-old struggle against monopoly and corruption stretching back to the railroad barons of the 1860s.
The lesson is clear: we must resist, document, archive, and expose. They can erase channels, but they cannot erase the spirit of resistance. This Is Not Spam. This is defiance. This is the fight to keep history alive.
Occupy 2.5 