Is it too geopolitically insane to promote our videogame?
I spent the last two days of my vacation at my desk making vertical short-form videos about Skin Deep, so that we could upload them to a Popular Short Form Video Platform to promote the game before the Steam Summer Sale.
Unfortunately, every video we uploaded, across two accounts, was marked as a "community guidelines violation" and frozen forever in Short Form Video Purgatory.
The first video was a video of a rotating cat in an orange starfield with cute music. This went through several hours of review, then was marked as a violation. We requested a appeal, which processed for close to 48 hours before we gave up and nuked the account. During this time, noted Popular Short Form Video Platform did not seem to register when we uploaded other videos. We'd get a confirmation and nothing would happen. It was pretty clear that we'd been silently choked off by a moderation system.
We then started a new account and tried again, this time with a different video. This one also went through review, then came out as a violation. Neither contained gore, sexual content, or copyrighted material - in fact, both passed the platform's copyright check before getting caught in review hell.
When we consulted with a community management professional, they pointed out that some of their friends had experienced trouble with the platform over the last few days, and remarked that it was possible that this Popular Short Form Video Platform was being extremely strict and overzealous with bot management and detection algorithms due to the, uh, generally insane state of the world right now. It's not good to be a new account during a time like this, or to be a new account in the city where we live, which is currently being targeted by a genocidal ethnic cleansing paramilitary organization supported by the federal government. I guess The Platform considers Los Angeles just too hazardous to allow a lot of new accounts here to upload videos.
We know it's the city or the account age because we were able to get our video tested on an older account operated from a different city. There, it went through just fine and did appear publicly. So the video itself was unremarkable. It's our newness, or our LosAngelesness that's the problem.
We're in the middle of a spasm of global political turmoil and violence that I've really not seen in my life before. It's possible that this Short Form Video Platform was trying to prevent... violent videos from LA riots? New bot accounts posting propaganda about a possible invasion of Iran? or something??? Imagined horrors? Who knows.
This is so far the only suggestion we've gotten that makes any sense. It's pretty preposterous that you can make an account on this platform, spend several hours interacting with it normally to establish that you are a real person, and then just find yourself completely choked off from video uploads in a way that other accounts in other places are not.
This is extremely frustrating to me in particular because I spent two days of my vacation making 13 videos for us to post as promotional material. It's pretty crazy that I can't do one of my Boring Fucking Indoor Laptop Jobs because Trump is trying to start a nuclear war and also invade my city with the actual US Marines.
There is no way to hide from this shit. There's no guarantee that a single corner of your life will remain pristinely unpolluted by the derangement of the current moment. Whoof!!!!!!