Can’t get any screenshots right now, but I left a comment on the recent Onion video about the white house trans alarm, just a funny little bit about how republicans can’t decide what bathroom trans people should be using.
It stayed up for a while, then just suddenly vanished. I tested a combination of words to see what triggered it. Any comments that I used the word “cis” in were instantaneously shadow banned. Additionally, when trying to let people know about that, I discovered merely referring to a shadow ban also gets your comment shadow banned, presumably to keep people from talking about the practice.
Just to be safe, I control-F’d and searched the entire comment section for the word cis. It was a video about trans people. It’s a straight up inevitability that it’d be used at least once. But nope, not a single reference to the word anywhere in the comments. That settles it in my mind.
I don’t know why I expected YouTube to be better than that.
On the whole site, or just that channel? Because that may be due to channel settings which allow channel owners to hide comments containing certain terms. See “Blocked Words” on:
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9483359?hl=en#zippy=%2Cblocked-words
Not that YouTube has a great track record, but forbidding "cis’ would be pretty drastic. For better or worse, many channels choose to filter terms like this to keep their comments sections free of controversy.
The same goes for comments about shadow banning: channels filter terms relating to this so that controversial videos (which many Onion videos will be, especially for those that like eating onions) don’t end up with a comments section that’s nothing but complaints about being filtered, or at least so that the comments section looks the way they want it to. I’ve seen various YouTubers talk about this over the years.
I’m pretty sure I’ve only ever once used the word cis on any other occasion, but I can’t even find the video it was a comment on anymore to check if my comment is still there. It was a short about trying to explain to cis people why cis wasn’t a slur. I don’t know if I’m blind or it’s genuinely gone.
You might be right though. Albeit I’d find it odd for the Onion to be blocking trans related words in a video explicitly about trans people, but it could explain why my first comment was up for 10 minutes or so before vanishing. But the first time it wasn’t shadow banned, it was completely gone, even on my end, so I suspect it was manually removed.