YouTube's New Policy on Gun Videos

The New York Times recently ran a story about YouTube changing its policy about allowing videos

pertaining to "the sale or manufacture of firearms and their accessories, specifically items like ammunition, gatling triggers, and drop-in auto sears". According to YouTube, the new policy will go into effect in April 2018.

As announced in October 2017,  YouTube had already made clear its plan to take down "video tutorials" about how to make guns fire bullets more rapidly via the use of a bump stock device. That decision was in response to a mass shooting that month in Las Vegas, wherein the shooter used a bump stock to rapidly spray bullets and take lives.  

The policy is not entirely new, but more of an expansion on YouTube's existing policy about dangerous or harmful content. In my book, Guns on the Internet,  forthcoming from Routledge/Taylor & Francis in August 2018, I include a chapter on YouTube gun videos. 

(I found videos using search terms like "bumpfire" and "bump stock", among others.) My specific interest in writing this chapter was whether gun-related video content should be protected speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, using standards such as those established through prior court cases. In other words, to what extent does the gun-related content of a video constitute political speech, or contribute to the marketplace of ideas? In a way, YouTube gun videos represent an intersection of sorts of the First and Second Amendments, with the caveat that YouTube is not a government entity and can enforce standards that are much more restrictive than Constitutional free speech standards. 

Source: http://blog.k-var.com/news/nssf-youtubes-policy-causes-concern/

Will the new policy mainly affect commercial operations like GlockStore, or will individuals -- gun owner YouTubers -- be impacted as well? On the blog of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the new policy is, unsurprisingly, decried as "censorship". 

My guess would be that the policy will not be uniformly enforced. Will YouTube staff do searches on words like "bumpfire" and "bumpfiring" and remove each and every video with those words in the tagline? That might be in the tens of thousands of videos. They could do this, but then YouTubers may simply switch to other synonyms (e.g., "rapid fire shooting with __________" [fill in name of gun]).

Time will tell how much of an impact YouTube's new policy will make.