This story was originally published on Passionfruit.
On June 9, Kelly Van Achte, known online as the Act Man, tweeted that his YouTube channel was demonetized. The cause wasn’t the months of a bitter back-and-forth feud between him and review channel QuantumTV, which involved Van Achte calling out the reviewer for harassing critics and his alleged past use of homophobic slurs. Rather, it was the consequence of a tweet Van Achte claimed was satire, one that threatened “to dox the families of YouTube employees & creators,” according to YouTube on Twitter.
The channel Van Achte built, with over 1.5 million subscribers accrued since 2013, is no longer able to make any income off of Google AdSense. It sparked a massive online backlash, with #JusticeforActMan pulling in over 100,000 tweets on Twitter over just one week and multiple creators with millions of subscribers chiming in.
