Google and YouTube elicited calls of anger and outrage earlier this week, when they shuttered the accounts of a number of content creators working in ASMR spaces, 404 Media reports. These creators—the majority of whom are female-presenting—were told that they were being shut down due to violating YouTube’s policies on “sexually gratifying” content, including by allegedly linking to content hosted in places other than the video-sharing site. As is standard for YouTube, the accounts in question have been not just shut down (blocking access to what were in some cases hundreds of thousands of subscribers) but also have had all of their content taken down, a move that represents the deletion of what was sometimes years of work from the creators in question.
Because you’re a person who exists on the internet, you’ve presumably encountered ASMR (a.k.a. autonomous sensory meridian response) content somewhere online before: Although it’s taken myriad forms over the years since the term was first coined and codified, it usually revolves around soft or soothing sounds like whispers that produce what enjoyers colloquially refer to as “tingles.” It has also, in that time, created roughly 8 million arguments online about whether the stimulation in question is inherently sexual in nature—pretty much all serious devotees and creators say no, although explicitly erotic ASMR content for-sure exists—which is a debate that Google has now blundered straight into the middle of with these bans.
According to a statement to 404, YouTube says it wasn’t so much objecting to the material being posted to its own site, but to alleged violations of its external linking policies. Some, but not all, of the creators of channels targeted by the bans—a roster that includes names like ItsBunniiASMR, Slight Sounds, Nananightray, Roseasmr, Simoneasmr, and Janina Wilhelmsen—also create more explicitly sexual content on other sites like OnlyFans, which sometimes appeared in link aggregators like linktree. (It’s not clear if these aggregators were present on the YouTube channels in question, on account of them having been zealously nuked from orbit.) “Our external link policies apply equally to all creators across YouTube,” the company’s statement said, “And this action was taken in accordance with our long-standing policies, not as a change in policy or targeting of ASMR content.”
Creators, meanwhile, have expressed anger at what they say feels like an arbitrary and abrupt enforcement of the policy, with the shutdowns arriving earlier this week with no warnings or requests to alter either contents or links. Noting that a lot of ASMR content is consumed by people dealing with anxiety or sleep issues, these creators expressed frustration at both the loss of revenue, and the walls thrown up between them and their audiences—to say nothing of ongoing frustration at their videos being classified as sexual in nature. And, given that this latter issue sits at intersections between topics including intimacy, sex work, the monetization of parasocial connections, sexism, and about a million other conceptual ingredients that make up a decent chunk of the soup of the modern internet, we’re just going to close out here with a quote from creator Slight Sounds, who gave 404 a pretty powerful description of some of the topics at work:
I think because ASMR is very female-dominated—because it is a very intimate video style, and there is this sweet woman taking care of you and whispering to you—I think people, especially men, confuse closeness and intimacy with sex. There is this inherent thing that happens when men interact with women online in a specific way, and there is this sexual energy that they feel, even if it’s just closeness that they’re feeling. I think that ASMR has always had this undercurrent of: No matter what you do as a woman in ASMR, someone is going to find it sexual. Someone’s going to call it weird. Someone’s going to fetishize it.
Most of the creators have apparently attempted to appeal the YouTube bans; all of these appeals have reportedly been rejected.
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