14-Year Old YouTuber Soph Comes Under Fire for Videos Criticizing Social Justice and Woke Culture

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May 16, 2019

A teenage satirist on YouTube has become the latest target of deplatforming attempts due to a mainstream media outlet taking personal issue with her content.

The YouTuber in question, a user by the name of ‘Soph’, is a fourteen-year old YouTuber whose content routinely criticizes social justice rhetoric and the growing absurdity of ‘woke’ culture. Soph, along with a collaborator who sometimes assists in writing the scripts, often uses edgy humor to emphasize her arguments, delivering her points bluntly as she discusses issues such as the growing toxicity of ‘fandom culture’, the power dynamics of modern dating, or the systemic issues prevalent in the modern education system:

On May 13th, Soph caught the attention of BuzzFeed News Reporter Joseph Bernstein, who published a scathing piece for Buzzfeed titled “YouTube’s Newest Far-Right, Foul-Mouthed, Red-Pilling Star Is A 14-Year-Old Girl”. The catalyst for this piece was a video uploaded by Soph titled Be Not Afraid, wherein Soph harshly criticizes the growing trend of social media censorship and the dynamics of outrage culture (the original upload has since been deleted by YouTube):

In his piece, Bernstein discusses the supposed dangers of Soph’s channel, a point Bernstein reinforces by conflating Soph’s videos with the actions of the Christchurch and San Diego shooters:

“Soph’s scripts, which she says she writes with a collaborator, are familiar: a mix of hatred toward Muslims, anti-black racism, Byzantine fearmongering about pedophilia, tissue-thin incel evolutionary psychology, and reflexive misanthropy that could have been copied and pasted from a thousand different 4chan posts. Of course, it’s all presented in the terminally ironic style popularized by boundary-pushing comedy groups like the influential Million Dollar Extreme and adopted of late by white supremacist mass shooters in Christchurch and San Diego.”

Bernstein also calls on YouTube to censor Soph’s channel, painting her channel’s existence as a sort of moral failure on the part of YouTube, going so far as to contact YouTube regarding potential actions taken against Soph’s channel and the Be Not Afraid video:

“YouTube’s kid problem is well-known. From disturbing auto-generated cartoons to parents who playact violence with their children for clicks to a network of users exploiting videos of children for sexual content, the company has consistently failed at protecting the young users who are its most valuable assets. But Soph’s popularity raises another, perhaps more difficult question, about whether YouTube has an obligation to protect such users from themselves — and one another.”

“After being contacted about the story, YouTube reviewed Soph’s channel. It removed the video containing the death threat against Wojcicki, but not “Be Not Afraid” or any others. The company also issued Soph a strike, which prevents her from uploading videos for a week.”

Following the publication of Bernstein’s piece, Soph found she had received an additional strike against her channel (independent of the one issued in response to the Be Not Afraid video) and that her uploading privileges had indeed been revoked:

In response to these actions by YouTube, Soph created an alternate channel on bitchute, a precaution taken to avoid the loss of a platform in the event that YouTube deleted her channel:

Ultimately, in a twist of irony, the negative attention brought upon Soph and the moral panic incited by Bernstein’s article led to Soph being invited, and appearing as a guest, on Infowars, hosted by Alex Jones:

What do you make of Soph being targeted by BuzzFeed News and subsequently receiving a number strikes on her YouTube channel?

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