I was writing songs about modern relationships when I discovered Dating Delusions, a YouTube channel where a man's voice dissected Tinder profiles with AI-generated music and that particular brand of semi-mean-spirited humor that lives in the light red pill space. I watched at least five hours of this content; not because I agreed with it, but because I was researching how men talk about women when they think women aren't listening. The channel had over 100,000 followers. Every episode began with "Welcome to another episode of Dating Delusions..."
Then I went back to reference something specific, and it was gone. Not just the channel: my entire watch history had been scrubbed. Ten to fifteen hours of viewed content, erased. No "This channel has been terminated" page. No [Deleted Video] placeholders. Just nothing. As if it had never existed.
The Disorientation
I genuinely wondered if I'd imagined it. That's what gaslighting feels like at institutional scale: when a platform with more authority than your own memory tells you something never existed, your brain starts negotiating with reality. Maybe it was a different channel? Maybe I'm confusing it with something else? But I could remember specific phrases, the intro music, the host's commentary style. I had visceral memories of listening while working on Encoded Echoes my album exploring AI and human relationships.
This is where the crowdsourced memory phenomenon comes in. I've watched YouTube creators thank their audiences for preserving videos that were taken down, for grabbing copies before deletion. There's an informal archive system emerging where if enough people care, someone screenshots, someone downloads, someone preserves. But there's no connection between the person who archives and the person who's questioning their sanity three months later. The archive exists in theory but is functionally invisible unless you already know what you're looking for and have the language to search for it.
For most things, I see an article. Then I see it's changed. And I wonder if I made up the original version. This isn't paranoia; it's the rational response to living in an environment where the record itself is mutable.
The Discovery: It's Already Political
Then I started researching whether this was a broader phenomenon. Turns out, it absolutely is, and it's already being weaponized for political control.
In 2020-2021, YouTube conducted mass purges of channels for spreading what the platform deemed "misinformation" about COVID-19 and the 2020 election. Entire channels with hundreds of thousands of followers, people's entire bodies of work, simply vanished. Then in 2025, following direct pressure from the House Judiciary Committee, YouTube quietly began offering reinstatement to many of those same accounts. What was "dangerous misinformation" one year became "permissible political debate" the next.
But here's the crucial part: when those channels were restored, what happened to the historical record? Did people's watch histories get restored? Did the gap in the archive get acknowledged? Or does the platform just present the new reality as if it's the only one that ever existed?
The same pattern appears elsewhere. In 2016, The New York Times substantially rewrote an article about Bernie Sanders' legislative accomplishments hours after publication, changing the headline from "Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years" to "Bernie Sanders Won Modest Victories" and adding disparaging paragraphs. The Times' own Public Editor called this practice a violation of transparency, writing that "the changes were so substantive that a reader who saw the piece when it first went up might come away with a very different sense of Mr. Sanders's legislative accomplishments." The original version disappears; the corrected version is presented as if it were always the truth.
Independent monitoring services like NewsDiffs now exist specifically to track these silent alterations, creating the public change-logs that publishers themselves refuse to maintain. The fact that such tools are necessary tells you everything about how routine this practice has become.
Reddit banned approximately 2,000 subreddits in June 2020, erasing years of discussion and community archives. Then they blocked the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine from crawling their content: ostensibly to prevent AI scraping, but the effect is the same. No independent historical record exists. Reddit controls its own history completely.
This isn't theoretical. It's not a slippery slope argument. It's already happening at scale, and we're only noticing when it affects us personally.
Why This Matters Beyond YouTube
We spend eight-plus hours a day online. For many of us, digital spaces are where we work, socialize, learn, and form our understanding of current events. If those spaces can be retroactively edited without acknowledgment, then our lived experience becomes unreliable.
This connects to something I'm exploring in The Perfect Storm: the collapse of trust in authority and how it affects long-term decision making. When you can't trust that the information you accessed yesterday will exist tomorrow, or worse, when you can't trust that it will remain unchanged, you stop making decisions based on institutional knowledge. You start relying entirely on personal memory and immediate social networks, which fragments society into reality bubbles that can't even agree on what happened last month.
The platforms argue they're just enforcing Terms of Service. But Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives them nearly unlimited legal immunity to remove content "in good faith" with zero transparency requirements. There's no external oversight, no audit trail, no accountability. When YouTube terminates a channel, they send a vague email ("repeated Community Guidelines violations") with no specifics about which content was violative or who made the decision. The user can appeal, but they're appealing to the same entity that made the initial decision, with no access to the evidence against them.
George Orwell wrote about "memory holes" in 1984: literal chutes where inconvenient documents were destroyed, with the Ministry of Truth constantly rewriting history to match the Party's current needs. The crucial difference is that Orwell imagined a centralized state apparatus. What we have is privatized, automated, and arguably more pervasive because it's presented as corporate policy rather than authoritarian control.
Soviet propagandists famously airbrushed people out of photographs: Yezhov vanishing from Stalin's side after his execution. But that was labor-intensive, geographically limited, and left physical evidence of tampering. Digital erasure happens instantly, globally, and leaves no trace. The cost of rewriting history has collapsed to essentially zero.
The Mandela Effect communities, where people share memories of things that seem to have changed, are often dismissed as internet weirdos. But maybe they're canaries in the coal mine, trying to articulate the profoundly destabilizing experience of living with a mutable, retroactively edited public record.
What Happens Next
Dating Delusions was trivial: a channel about Tinder profiles, nothing that matters to history. That's exactly what makes its disappearance so significant. If a 100K-subscriber channel can vanish without a trace, what about the content that actually matters?
What happens when this infrastructure is applied to journalism during election cycles, scientific data about public health, evidence of corporate malfeasance, documentation of human rights abuses, or historical records of government actions?
We already know platforms show different content to different users based on algorithmic profiling. We know news organizations stealth-edit articles. We know that what constitutes "misinformation" is contingent and political, shifting based on who's in power. We have the technical infrastructure, the legal immunity, and documented cases of politically motivated mass erasures followed by selective restorations.
The only thing preventing this from being used to fundamentally alter the historical record is what, exactly? Corporate goodwill? Regulatory oversight that doesn't exist? A free press that's subject to the same erasure mechanisms?
I wanted to write songs about modern relationships, so I researched how men talk about women in semi-anonymous online spaces. That research material no longer exists, and I have no way to prove I didn't imagine it. This is a small, personal example of a much larger problem: we're building a society where the past is editable, where your memory can be contradicted by an authoritative digital interface, where proof of what happened yesterday might not exist tomorrow.
The disorientation I felt when Dating Delusions disappeared, that vertigo of not being able to trust my own experience, that's not a bug. That's the intended psychological effect of living in a system where reality itself is mutable.
Until we demand transparency, independent oversight, and legal accountability for platforms that control our historical record, we're all living in a world where "I remember this happening" carries less weight than "the platform says it didn't."
And that should terrify us.
Further Reading
On Platform Content Removal:
- Google Admits Censorship Under Biden, U.S. House Judiciary Committee (2025)
- YouTube to start bringing back accounts of creators banned for misinformation, CBS News (2025)
- The Great Ban: Reddit's 2020 Mass Subreddit Deletions, arXiv preprint
On Stealth Editing:
- Public editor knocks New York Times for stealth-editing Bernie Sanders story, Poynter (2016)
- NewsDiffs.org: independent service tracking changes to online news articles
On Legal Framework & Historical Context:
- Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Congressional Research Service
- Inside Stalin's Darkroom, Hoover Institution on Soviet photo manipulation
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
On Psychological & Social Impact:
- What Is Gaslighting?, Simply Psychology on institutional gaslighting
- Media Technologies and Epistemologies, International Journal of Communication on platform sovereignty