A couple of weeks back, I posted a short to YouTube. It clocked in at 2 minutes and 50 seconds. Like most every other short I’ve ever posted I didn’t expect anything to happen. But the next morning I woke up and that video had amassed 800 views (which isn’t that surprising) yet it had over 50 likes. This was 10x the number of likes I’d ever gotten before. For a tiny little channel like mine with just 78 current subscribers, I had a verified hit on my hands.
Over the next two weeks I began looking at what I’d done in that first short and began making more shorts attempting to capture this momentum, I posted more videos, that continued to do far better than my older shorts, so I assumed that with a little time, I could break out of the current 1200 view ceiling the Short Algorithm was putting over me.
That is, until the FBI raided the Georgia Election Commission offices.
But, I’m getting ahead of myself. In order to tell this story properly I’ll need to make a small side quest explaining my understanding of how the YouTube shorts algorithm works. This is a combination of my own observations, and ironically enough, leveraging Google Gemini to help explain what was going on. The conclusion I came to is quite concerning, but as Dr. River Song said “Spoilers.”
For a small channel like mine with very few subscribers and a massively infrequent posting schedule, when you upload a new video there’s usually a 2-4 hour window where your video appears to do absolutely nothing. During this time the Shorts system is transcribing your video, looking at the meta data, and trying to make a first pass attempt at making sure you aren’t doing something stupid like calling for the assassination of Donald Trump. Trust me, do NOT make a short like that.
Once that initial pass is done, and the Shorts algorithm has decided you aren’t the next Lee Harvey Oswald, it will “seed” your short out to one hundred to three hundred viewers. If those views watch your video, engage with it, and more importantly don’t report it, then your video is queued up for a second seed. Right now I think that second seed tops out around 1200 viewers. After another few hours of waiting, if your video is of decent quality, it will start to be pushed out to the Short Feed again, and it will be this next set of viewers that really get to decide if your video is worthy or not to be shown wider.
Now before I get back to talking about Georgia, I first need to tell you about my Congress Woman Lisa McClain who represents the Michigan 9th congressional district, and why those 50 likes told me I was on to somthing.
The day I posted that video Lisa McClain and her husband were caught trading the private stock of Elon Musk’s xAI company, they are the ones that make Grok. And the McClains were running afoul of STOCK act reporting, again. Yes…again. The more baffling part of the whole situation is that she went on TV and attempted to laugh it off as “This couldn’t have been insider trading, otherwise we would have bought more.”
Honestly, at this point, please just go watch the 3 part series if you want the full details. But in short, I simply pointed out that she was a former VP of Hantz Financial Services, the number 4 in GOP leadership, on the Armed Services committee and that if she thinks we’re going to believe this was all just a coincidence, well…I know her auto biography.
I’m rather proud of these three videos and honestly are some of the best performing videos I’ve ever done, even with the tiny reach.
On January 24th I posted a quick video after the murder of Alex Pretti asking the question “What is the goal here?” pointing out that Minnesota is a state with maybe 150k undocumented immigrants and Texas had 2 million. Within six hours it had wracked up 870 views and 22 likes.
At this point as a content creator, I’m feeling rather happy. I’d just posted 5 videos in the span of less than 2 weeks and each had double digit likes and sub thousand views. To me, I’m in the zone, I’ve figured out a good tone change that seems to be resonating and gaining traction. In my mind, I’m making the right progress to eventually get shown out to a broader group of people.
Which brings us back to Georgia. On January 28th, 2026 the FBI raided offices in Fulton County Georgia because Donald Trump is still obsessed with stealing the 2020 election. The election was over 6 years ago….but he’s still trying to steal it.
You should go watch this video too, it’s short, but if you don’t want to click the link, here’s the complete text.
Let’s play THAT’S not a coincidence. So, last week we learned from Jack Smith that information at the Georgia Bureau of Elections was instrumental to his case, proving that Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. And today, it was raided by the FBI.
As of today 3PM EST on January 31, 2026 this video has been seen by 35 people. The YouTube Short algorithm has convinced itself that my “hot take” here, is so toxic nobody should see it.
The irony, it is simply stating two facts with a punchy opening hook.
Fact 1: In public testimony Jack Smith indicated that information from Georgia was key to his case.
Fact 2: The FBI raided Georgia.
As the hours ticked on, and there was no traction, I decided to ask Google Gemini to analyze the video and script to try and help figure out what about this one stopped dead.
The initial assessment was that because this was breaking news and I had somehow managed to squeeze Jack Smith, Donald Trump, 2020 Election, and FBI Raid all in 18 seconds, I needed to be put in time out because Coke isn’t going to want to pay an impression next to it. Authoritative news sources like the Associated Press or … Fucking Fox News have a free pass in the Shorts algorithm. Me, I’m just some dude with a cell phone.
Annoyed, I was about to leave it there, somewhat demoralized and just move on with my life. And for a lot of people that’s where their similar stories end as well.
But, something else has happened recently, and this is where this story truly goes off the rails. Google has now integrated Gemini directly into the YouTube studio interface. You can click the button, brainstorm with Gemini, and it will help you improve your videos.
So, I decided to see if the embedded AI might be able to give me a little more specific information. And so I asked, and you can see in the screen shots for yourself the conversation.
First I simply asked “I’m trying to figure out why this hasn’t been seeded yet.” Based on all of my previous experience, within the first few hours I should have expected to see a few dozen views. Gemini flatly told me “I can’t help you with that.”
Now since abusing LLM’s is a past-time of mine, I then pressed harder, “How are you supposed to help me improve my videos if you can’t tell me what’s wrong with them?” And in the screenshot you can see it gave me a very lovely answer as to its capability and it enthusiastically asked me for the video link so it could get started.
So I gave it the direct link to my video. “I can’t help with that.”
And this, this is where my story here has real and true implications for America today.
I can’t help with that.
This is safety protocols jumping in. These are additional restrictions that YouTube engineers have put in place to prevent the embedded Gemini from giving too much of the secret sauce away and, in this case, suppress a potentially toxic subject because their advertisers might not like it.
The comedy in all of this, is my statements were verifiable facts. Fox News had more misinformation posted within minutes of Alex’s shooting, but my observation that we had just heard testimony regarding Georgia was important and now the Trump-Led DOJ was raiding the place, this was dangerous.
And today, at the end of January 2026, this has real impact. TikTok is now controlled by Larry Ellison, a massive right wing billionaire. Reports from TikTok users this week are that videos that attempt to even use the word “Epstein” are completely blocked. Twitter has become a cesspool of right wing propaganda. Facebook and Instagram are led by a dweeby tech bro who embraced MAGA because he thought that’s what the cool kids did. The only other viable platform with any substantial reach is YouTube. I’m not claiming YouTube is without billionaire and right wing influence, it certainly is, its motivations for hiding this video are slightly different, yet just as troubling.
Today on Twitter Elon can decide he doesn’t like you, and your account goes dark. Ellison seems bent on turning TikTok into something that also focuses a narrow world view. YouTube’s motivations are the Ad revenue.
This means that today, in the United States, there no longer exists a platform where new voices can flourish. Where a Midwest dad simply asking “Hey A and B just happened, this can’t be a coincidence, right?” is now a threat to the bottom line.
With so much misinformation how are voices of reason ever expected to elevate above the likes of Fox News?
We are at a moment in our history where our 1st Amendment rights may be the only thing that saves us. Every time the Trump administration pushes a lie it goes unchallenged. Mainstream news media voices have shown themselves to either toe the line, or allow it to go un-fact checked. And the smaller voices, the ones that are left, well, we are bad for business.
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