The past week or two have been an absolutely confusing and baffling rollercoaster of emotions for many content creators on YouTube with copyright claim abuse from YouTuber Quantum TV.

Many have observed how staff members at YouTube have been handling the situation relating to The Act Man and Quantum TV and are left in awe at how hard Team YouTube has been working to both silence anyone speaking about the situation and protect bad actors on the site.

For anyone unaware of how this all began, it stemmed from an Elden Ring review posted by Quantum TV, which promptly got criticism.

The now-deleted or hidden review of this beloved title was shallow and highly flawed which resulted in it getting attention from others wishing to refute the points made in the review. Mischief was the first channel to provide a critique on this review and upload it to youtube.

Quantum TV soon became aware of this and sent a copyright takedown notice to Mischief in an attempt to prevent the video from being seen by others. This proved successful as Mischief did take down the video at the time so as to not deal with the legal process involved with combating such a claim.

However, this had brought more attention to the situation resulting in The Act Man also providing a critique of Quantum TV’s review. In an attempt to also silence this criticism, Quantum TV sent a copyright takedown to The Act Man hoping for the same result as with Mischief. However, the exact opposite had occurred.

In response to the copyright takedown, various other videos from well know content creators such as ReviewTechUSA, SomeOrdinaryGamers, and others covered Quantum TV’s abuse of the copyright system.

Not only this, but The Act Man created another video that had gone into the copyright abuse situation, but also exposed various other hateful and malicious acts conducted by Quantum TV to other YouTubers and the LGBT community.

This insurance of criticism had definitely caused some anger to grow towards Quantum TV, who weaponized his audience to find out any public and private information relating to The Act Man. He had even gone as far as to find the phone number of The Act Man’s real mother and harass her in an attempt to get the video removed.

After this, all the creators had worked to attempt to get YouTube to respond to the matter by removing Quantum TV’s channel from the platform to set an example that such behavior should not be tolerated.

However, the team investigating the situation had reported that “[YouTube’s] specialist team did not find any violations of [their] community guidelines”.

Many creators had expressed extreme dissatisfaction with this response seeing it as YouTube attempting to remain hands-off once again and only do the bare minimum to investigate the issue at hand.

Some had created videos in response to this, including The Act Man himself, who released an hour-long video doing a deep dissection using YouTube’s own words and TOS to blatantly show how Quantum TV had broken various rules on the site and needed to be removed for the heath of various communities and the site as a whole.

However, in a move nobody had seen coming, staff at YouTube had taken action against The Act Man and removed the latest video on the topic for violating the policy regarding nudity and sexual content.

This left many confused as the only thing that could have violated the policy was a poorly edited cucumber joke which hadn’t even taken up a fraction of the video’s overall watch time. What’s more, after the removal had occurred a flurry of blows had been dealt to The Act Man’s channel.

The most notable actions from YouTube being two other videos being age-restricted and demonetized, the rejection of the appeal on the latest video where staff at YouTube only watched half of the video before rejecting it again, and finally the complete demonetization of The Act Man’s channel. Act Man confirmed YouTube’s reasoning behind this was his jokes about doxxing YouTube staff.

While not confirmed outright, it was easy to see that The Act Man was being targeted after this incident and being bullied into silence. Even other YouTuber’s such as ReviewTechUSA and Optimus have been demonetized for mentioning the topic in any form and been given the cold shoulder by YT staff after publically announcing how they stand by The Act Man.

Why YouTube is bending over backward to defend the situation is completely unknown to anyone other than the staff at YouTube themselves. YouTube needs to take a deep look at itself in the mirror and see if this is truly the hill they want to die on.

Hopefully, we may be able to escape this dark and confusing moment and watch The Act Man rise from the ashes. However, the final judgment is in YouTube’s hands and only they can decide if Quantum TV is truly guilty or not guilty. We’ll report on the outcome of this ordeal should YouTube finally make a decision.

This is Niche Culture. In this column, we regularly cover anime, geek culture, and things related to video games. Please leave feedback and let us know if there’s something you want us to cover!