Aussie YouTuber Keeps Having Videos Demonetised Because Of His Accent

Australians are known for having a pretty distinctive accent. OK, we're not exactly fighting over pronunciations like our fellow English practitioners in the US and the UK, but it's very easy to identify an Aussie in a crowd of voices.

But it seems our distinctive twang has the potential to get us into trouble.

One Aussie YouTuber has found that out the hard way after realising the video streaming site was demonetising his videos.

Fynnpire has been doing videos on YouTube as a profession for the last two years and depends on the revenue generated from his clips to feed his family.

But he noticed that viewership on a few videos was dropping off suddenly and some were being flagged by the service for 'strong profanity used in a hateful or derogatory way'.

YouTube has an automatic transcribing service to chuck captions onto the video and it seems like this has been picking up odd words that aren't there.

For example, in one video, Fynnpire said: "Alright give me this car."

But YouTube's transcribing service thought he said the word 'c***' and sent him a message that his video was using a strong profanity. This unfortunately happened after the video was uploaded.

Fynnpire does swear in his videos but, he says, not to the point where it should get demonetised.

He told BuzzFeed News: "I think YouTube's auto caption system is probably having a hard time understanding my accent.

Fynnpire/Instagram

"I think they just need to open up some means of communication with YouTubers, or a system that allows us to specify where YouTube might had made a mistake with monetisation.

"I have a mortgage, children of my own, and a financial responsibility to provide for them. Knowing a video can cease to be profitable due to these mistakes does scare me, yes."

Another video was also flagged because YouTube thought he uttered a racial slur.

Fynnpire opened the clip by saying: "My name is Fynnpire, we're back, we're playing Undead Development. We're continuing on with this map today."

Fynnpire/YouTube

Sounds pretty innocuous, right?

Well, apparently YouTube thought Fynnpire said 'wetback' instead of 'we're back', which is a slur against Mexicans living in the US.

Thankfully, the Aussie content creator has been able to appeal against the issues and get the videos back up and running with ads.

Either YouTube will have to get a piece of Australian language software embedded into its transcribing service or Fynnpire will be toast.

Topics: News, Weird, Australia

Stewart Perrie

Stewart Perrie is a Trending Journalist at LADbible. His first job was as a newsreader and journalist at the award winning Sydney radio station, Macquarie Radio. He was solely responsible for the content broadcast on multiple stations across Australia when the MH17, Germanwings and AirAsia disasters unfolded. Stewart has covered the conflict in Syria for LADbible, interviewing a doctor on the front line, and has contributed to the hugely successful UOKM8 campaign.

@stewartperrie