YouTube’s new AI enforcement wave looks less like a policy update and more like the World Health Organization’s crusade against nicotine. In this worrying GFN Interview, GrimmGreen shows how safer-nicotine content is now being flagged as “medical misinformation” under rules that echo the WHO’s narrative: nicotine equals harm—no nuance allowed. After sixteen years as one of the most trusted voices helping adult smokers escape combustible tobacco, GrimmGreen is once again fighting to keep his channel alive.
Featuring:
NICK GREEN “GrimmGreen”
Vape Lifestyle & Advocacy, Content Creator
@GrimmGreen
Transcription:
00:10 - 01:11
[Brent Stafford]
Hi, I'm Brent Stafford and welcome to another edition of RegWatch on GFN.tv. Something is happening on YouTube, and creators across the platform are feeling it. Over the past several weeks, channels in multiple genres have been hit with sudden demonetization, retroactive age restrictions and unexpected strikes, and even takedowns of long-standing videos. The pattern is widespread and the impact has been severe, but nowhere is the fallout more damaging than in tobacco harm reduction. Because when enforcement sweeps through this space, it doesn't just hit creators, it hits adult smokers searching for lifesaving information. Joining us today is one of the content creators experiencing the brunt of these recent actions. It's GrimGreen, a 16-year veteran of YouTube, a trusted voice for adult vapers, and one of the most recognizable advocates in the THR movement. Nick, it's great to see you again, and thanks for coming back on the show.
01:11 - 01:18
[Nick Green]
Thank you for having me, Brent. I wish it were under better circumstances, but here we go. Here we go again. Again.
01:18 - 01:22
[Brent Stafford]
So start by telling us what's going on right now.
01:23 - 02:48
[Nick Green]
It seems like once a year, YouTube will sweep through a lot of the vape content on YouTube. It always kind of goes in line with each other. Someone will get a strike, And then someone else will get a strike and then someone else will get a warning. And we all kind of know, oh, OK, YouTube is doing a yearly sweep through of our channels and we usually survive. There was one year that I did get three full strikes and had to escalate it to YouTube to get, you know, on Twitter X to get my channel back. But this kind of happens every year. And I got a warning in October, on October 27th, and I thought, okay, uh-oh, like, here we go. This is gonna be a thing. And before you know it, over the course of the next five days, it was something like 15, 16 videos removed. In and amongst all of this, I got two strikes. I got some appeals. I got some appeals rejected. I got videos taken down for medical misinformation, which is a brand new thing. And I think this all stems from YouTube using their Gemini AI as a moderator to moderate videos. And I don't know that it's going very well.
02:49 - 03:06
[Brent Stafford]
So that's interesting. You know, there's been other creators and people we work with like GFN have had a couple of videos receive similar treatment. And they've been like scientific interviews, you know, with experts, worldwide experts on nicotine. And it seems like a targeting of nicotine.
03:07 - 04:03
[Nick Green]
It definitely does feel like a targeting of nicotine. The video that I had taken down for medical misinformation was a video that I did about the NIH MIND study, Vanderbilt University. NIH has been funding this study to the tune of millions of dollars to see if Nicotine dosing can help ameliorate Alzheimer's symptoms and help with memory improvement. And this is a big government funded study that I did a video on that got taken down for medical misinformation. And the reason that YouTube said it was medical misinformation is I didn't properly warn about the potential health dangers of nicotine in this video. I was only talking about how nicotine could probably improve your memory. And that supposedly is medical misinformation.
04:03 - 04:20
[Brent Stafford]
That's very worrying. Shocking. Yeah, very shocking. I'm surprised. I mean, I'm surprised I haven't had that happen to any of our videos because we've certainly talked positively about nicotine in the past.
04:20 - 04:52
[Nick Green]
And there's plenty of reasons to speak positively about nicotine. It's a very nuanced topic, although it's one of the most studied drugs on Earth. We have mountains of science about nicotine. But YouTube felt that me presenting nicotine in this sort of clinical trial where it might help people with Alzheimer's and dementia YouTube felt that I didn't say anything negative about nicotine in this video, so that became medical misinformation.
04:52 - 05:00
[Brent Stafford]
Okay, so it sounds like, did you get in touch with YouTube, or did you receive this kind of feedback just automatically?
05:00 - 05:46
[Nick Green]
uh it was just completely automated um you know on YouTube there's a little back end and there's a little warning that pops up and it says whatever we've given you a strike we've taken down your video we've age-gated your video I get a lot of notifications from YouTube and they took this video down citing medical misinformation I appealed it but the appeal is automated and gets returned to you within 30 seconds to a minute and it says appeal was rejected and I said Okay, I mean, that's as far as I can take it with YouTube. It's not possible within the Google YouTube, you know, technosphere to be able to talk to an actual human about anything meaningful about your channel, unfortunately.
05:47 - 05:59
[Brent Stafford]
Let's go back to 2022. When we last had you on, you'd gone through, as you mentioned, quite a similar experience. How was this different? And maybe talk a bit about what had happened back in 2022.
05:59 - 07:02
[Nick Green]
In 2022, I had gotten over the course of, I think it was like three weeks, I had got two strikes and then I got a third strike and my channel was completely taken down off of YouTube. I raised a huge stink on Twitter X, which is unfortunately the only viable pathway to try to get YouTube's attention. You have to kind of publicly shame them into helping you or communicating with you. Just even the last week on Twitter, I've seen hundreds of other creators outside of the THR space going through very similar things where they get a strike for a vague reason. And then when they follow up to try to ask about the reason, they get the automated YouTube. Well, here's our rules. Apparently, you didn't follow the rules enough. So here, read the rules again. And that just... I mean, that feels insane to me for a multi-billion dollar company to be treated like that.
07:04 - 07:18
[Brent Stafford]
So do you think that the algorithm, you know, this enforcement mechanism, this AI, do you think it's purposefully targeting tobacco harm reduction messaging or, you know, treating it as its dangerous material?
07:19 - 08:20
[Nick Green]
Definitely. I mean, I would say if that's not what's happening, that really feels like that's what's happening. Nicotine and vaping is a nuanced subject. And in my videos, I make sure to present it as a very, this is a personal thing for me type of thing. In my videos, I don't try to sell you anything. I'm not telling you where to buy these. I'm not telling you even how much they cost. I say things like, I wanna talk about my experience with this product, or here's what I do for this product. Here's how I build my coils. I'm deliberately trying to not even be instructional because I don't want that to be misinterpreted by YouTube. So they see me teaching someone how to vape. They consider that facilitating. I get in trouble for facilitating vaping or for facilitating the sale of harmful or regulated products.
08:21 - 08:32
[Brent Stafford]
Now you pointed out, I saw this on Twitter this time around, I think another example of people who for all intents and purposes are promoting smoking in their videos.
08:32 - 09:33
[Nick Green]
Yeah, yeah, yes, yes. YouTube is nothing if not completely inconsistent in that people can review cigarettes on YouTube. And as far as I know, they're not getting any strikes. They have lots of subscribers. They're fully monetized. And on top of cigarettes, you can watch a YouTube video with step-by-step instructions on how to distill your own liquor. which is a 21 and over product. And they're allowed to not only exist on YouTube, but be monetized and seemingly flourish with views and subscribers like I've never seen. But for some reason, nicotine outside of cigarettes, if it's in a pouch or it's in a vape, YouTube views that as really much worse than cigarettes or how to distill your own alcohol. They're nothing if not really hypocritical and inconsistent.
09:35 - 09:51
[Brent Stafford]
You can always count on YouTube to be a hypocrite. Yeah. You mentioned medical misinformation. I don't recall that as being something that Google had in their policy. Is this recent?
09:51 - 10:33
[Nick Green]
Uh, you know, I don't know. I don't, I don't know. The video itself was years old. I think I recorded that video in 2020. Got to be at least five years old by now. I don't know if they rolled out anything recently that said you can't say anything positive about nicotine or when you talk about nicotine, it has to only be in some sort of, you know, warning, danger, sort of panic. mode they could have rolled something out i was just shocked to see them call a study that the nih has funded to the tunes of millions of dollars medical misinformation
10:35 - 11:38
[Brent Stafford]
So I'm looking right now at Google's medical misinformation policy, and it has to be as recent at least as 2023, because they mention their 2023 blog post where they announced ending their several different policies around COVID-19. This is the medical misinformation policy in the YouTube help. And going down to harmful substances and practices as prevention methods. Well, right after gasoline, diesel, and kerosene use. Sure. It gets to content that claims tobacco does not cause cancer. Yeah. And content that claims nicotine is not addictive. Yeah. And so obviously that, or, you know, around those two things, like that last one, look, I guarantee you that in 2022, these did not exist in their policy when we did our last piece.
11:39 - 12:39
[Nick Green]
And it seems as though they're deliberately vague saying, making the claim that tobacco doesn't cause cancer, define tobacco. Does snooze cause cancer? Certainly not. And that is a tobacco product. It certainly does not cause cancer. So to have this weird, wide, vague paintbrush umbrella of tobacco... it feels like youtube likes to leave things deliberately vague so that we can't ever really get a straight answer as to why we're breaking the rules one time when i tried to clarify with youtube this was most likely back in 2022 they gave me this excuse of we can't be really precise with our rules because if we are creators will find a way to break them That's YouTube logic. It doesn't make any sense to me, but that's the logic that they used.
12:40 - 13:27
[Brent Stafford]
Now, it's one thing to glorify the use of a quote-unquote harmful substance, to promote products that contain that harmful substance, but to post that content that claims that tobacco does not cause cancer, that's the explicit thing they've put there. It's so strange. And then content that claims nicotine is not addictive. So, well... OK, so but does that mean that the nuance of the piece, if you're claiming that there's a bunch of benefits of nicotine? So, yeah, nicotine is addictive, but it's also good for all of these reasons. And it's within that nuance that they're going to they're going to, you know, clamp down on you.
13:27 - 14:04
[Nick Green]
Yeah, yes, because I didn't say enough negative things about nicotine, regardless of if that falls in line with the science or not. Like you said, it's a very nuanced topic, and you could make the argument that nicotine inside of cigarettes is addictive, but the nicotine inside of a pouch is habit-forming. These are two very different terminologies that mean two very different things, but that sort of nuance isn't really accepted or encouraged at YouTube in any capacity.
14:04 - 14:13
[Brent Stafford]
So this is cherry-picked, these Google medical misinformation. Feels a little cherry-picked.
14:13 - 14:21
[Nick Green]
Feels a little deliberately worded so that it could be targeted directly at people on YouTube making alternative nicotine videos.
14:22 - 14:29
[Brent Stafford]
Yeah, certainly it pulls anything that's related to vapes and pouches directly into the crosshairs.
14:29 - 14:47
[Nick Green]
directly into the crosshairs. And that's all I do. That's my mission. That's my goal. I don't want to pivot to anything else. I want to continue to be able to tell people who smoke cigarettes, hey, you can save your own life. That's all. That's really what I'd like to do.
14:49 - 14:58
[Brent Stafford]
YouTube's not having that. So how is this then affecting your ability to reach adult smokers who are looking for life-saving information?
14:58 - 15:55
[Nick Green]
Deeply, tremendously. Say what you will about lots of other platforms of which there are many options, but none of them are YouTube. YouTube is ingrained in us. It's where we look for things. It's where we watch movie clips. As much as we all dislike the platform, that's where the internet kind of lives. If you're looking for advice on how to repair your air conditioner, it's going to be on there. If you're looking for a soup recipe, it's gonna be on there. If you're looking for a way to quit smoking cigarettes, it's most likely gonna be on there. That's my only, you know, that's why I wanna keep my YouTube. I don't love YouTube as a company, but I like the audience that I've built there, and I like the ability to reach someone who smokes cigarettes and show them that you don't have to smoke cigarettes anymore. You just don't have to, simply don't have to.
15:56 - 16:00
[Brent Stafford]
Has this recent action impacted your ability to earn a living?
16:01 - 17:47
[Nick Green]
Well, I mean, yeah, quite a bit. There's a combination factor of this year alone in 2025, I was demonetized from YouTube, completely demonetized from YouTube. And additionally had my Patreon account deactivated, which between those two, that was all my income. I mean, that's all my monthly income. 100% of my monthly income kind of just disappeared completely. in the last three months. So what was the Patreon issue? Patreon is about as good as communicating with you as YouTube is, which is very little. I had a post up on Patreon for my patrons, which was an age-gated, age-checked thing. And apparently in my post, I had a link to a website that was a shopping website where I had a discount code. It said, hey, if you shop here, click this link, use my code, you get a little discount. that broke new rules and so they sent me an email and said you have 48 hours to delete this post because it breaks our new rules and I said okay so I went to Patreon to delete the post and it said my account had been deactivated already and I said okay so I emailed help and they said no your account's been deactivated because of that post That's the end of it. There's no appealing it. There's no, you know, they said I have six months to present evidence to get my Patreon back. I don't even know that that would be worth my time because an old post broke a new rule and now my Patreon's gone.
17:47 - 17:48
[Brent Stafford]
That's unbelievable.
17:48 - 20:07
[Nick Green]
I'm so sorry to hear that, Grim. Well, I mean, thank you. Yeah, it sucks. And it does take the wind out of your sails a little bit. But I mean, ultimately... Ultimately, this is about the mission, you know? And so I've kind of always believed that if I stick to the mission and I remain, you know, honest and accurate, that everything else will take care of itself, that I'll be able to do this in like a self-sustaining way. so i'm trying to remain hopeful you know i'm keeping my my cool kids club my patreon going outside of patreon you know i'm i'm streaming and doing things on other platforms to try to generate some sort of revenue so that i can keep doing this but it was a one-two punch getting demonetized and then deactivated by patreon that's your whole paycheck that's your whole payday that's your monthly salary that just disappeared So what's the next thing with YouTube? You're still up and active there? I'm still up and active on YouTube as it stands right now. I have two community guideline strikes that won't disappear until January and February, you know, respectively, next year, 2026. I'm still, as of this recording, in YouTube jail where I can't post, I can't upload a video, I can't live stream for two full weeks. That ends in a few days. And then after that, I'm just, I'm literally just walking on eggshells, hoping that they're done reviewing my content because sitting at two strikes and being out of YouTube jail is the scariest place to be because one slip up between now and January, that's it. I'll get a third strike and my channel will be gone. So it is, I feel like I've, I feel like I'm literally walking on eggshells. It's a crazy feeling of not knowing if I should even upload any more content because that's just one more video that they could give me a strike for. And looking back at all my old content thinking, I hope I did a good enough job of like editing and blurring things and keeping my YouTube videos compliant so that they won't get another strike. Even though that already happened.
20:08 - 20:17
[Brent Stafford]
Do you think YouTube's enforcement here is being influenced by outside institutions, public health agencies, NGOs, or anti-vaping campaigns?
20:18 - 21:38
[Nick Green]
I can only imagine. The way that it went on YouTube during the COVID pandemic was very much in line with the things that World Health Organization says. And anything that went outside of that, as we know, was... you know, deleted or struck or, you know, those people got in trouble, they got their YouTubes deleted. It feels like that is how it's going with tobacco and nicotine, is that anything that strays even slightly from established world health policies are going to be negatively impacted and looked at in a very negative way. I don't know if they're directly responsible, but it seems like YouTube is aligning itself with the largest of the largest organization possible. Which, I mean, it makes sense for them. But this is a sticky, you know, this is a sticky area. This isn't vaccines or anything else within the world health purview. It's tobacco. It's nicotine. It's, you know, this is an emerging technology, you know. And so I understand why they would do it.
21:38 - 22:32
[Brent Stafford]
I just wish they wouldn't. I mean, in the end, we're coming into conflict here with a fundamental issue that is rarely discussed because we talk about, you know, the harm reduction aspect of things, but there is just the pure pleasure aspect of nicotine. That's why everybody smoked. That's why you smoked until it killed you. So it's, you know, sure, nicotine is addictive, but it's more than that. It's also pleasurable. And so I'm sure right now, this is probably setting off dings in the YouTube overlords AI, but I mean- Watch out, be careful. Yeah, watch out. But I don't think we talk about it enough that there's the pleasure aspect, which means, by the way, that there will be new safer nicotine users. They won't just be former smokers.
22:33 - 24:02
[Nick Green]
Exactly. I mean, absolutely. And I'm on board with that. I agree with that. I don't think we should force someone to smoke for X amount of years or you have to contract COPD first before we let you have these harm reduction products. If we can get someone out of the gate not smoking cigarettes and using a pouch or a vape, Public health win. There's no way around that. That is an absolute public health win. And so I personally am very, very okay with nicotine naive people who might be interested in it, who might have a predilection towards it. for whatever neurotypical reasons, I'm perfectly happy and perfectly okay with nicotine naive people jumping into nicotine from a vape or nicotine from a pouch. There are known health benefits. And I didn't realize it was gonna take so long, I guess, for that to be an apparent thing like explain to someone if you take the nicotine out of the cigarettes it can be much better than if you're combusting it and burning it that's so difficult to communicate to people it just is you know but I feel like we're getting closer and closer to people realizing that nicotine outside of a burning cigarette might not be uh you know the health hazard that they've been told it is
24:03 - 24:18
[Brent Stafford]
Let me just ask you one more question regarding the automation. I mean, is it possible that an AI could understand the nuances here enough to be able to adequately enforce this stuff?
24:18 - 25:13
[Nick Green]
I mean, yes, I think it can, only because of my experiences talking to chat GPT about vaping, tobacco harm reduction, everything under the sun, EVALI, everything. Talking to Grok about it, it just depends on how the AI language model is trained. and if it has access to the information that it should, or if a user is allowed to discuss with an AI moderator why the decision they're making might be a bad decision and that there's actually nuance and scientific studies behind this and trying to reason with the machine. I think that's possible, but I don't know that Google has trained Gemini on the nuance of things like that in any capacity. I think, I don't know if they could for speed's sake. You know, they're reviewing probably tens of thousands of videos every day.
25:13 - 25:24
[Brent Stafford]
I'm not certain it's going to be like just a Gemini model. It's got to be something that's very specific, I would think. You know, an agent that's trained specifically for this task.
25:25 - 26:00
[Nick Green]
Yes, yes. All I've heard so far is that Google's using Gemini for YouTube moderation. whatever that umbrella statement means. I have no idea if it's the same Gemini that you use in Gmail or if it's a different language model or if it's been trained in a specific way to only look for certain things and flag certain things. That feels like the stronger possibility to me. It feels like it's very anti-nicotine, very anti-tobacco harm reduction, very un-understanding of lots of nuance.
26:01 - 26:08
[Brent Stafford]
So, Nick, what can the THR community out there do to lend a hand, if any, to help you get through this?
26:09 - 28:44
[Nick Green]
You know, people have done so much already. People send angry mail to YouTube and Twitter all the time, or YouTube on Twitter, I should say. whenever i i try not to uh to raise a big stink unless a big stink needs to be raised so if i get a strike i might mention it on twitter that's as far as that'll go in the event that there is like a third strike situation and i remove my you know my youtube gets removed completely That's when it would be the most beneficial to have people come out of the woodwork to help me communicate this to YouTube and to help me even just retweeting a post on on Twitter really goes a long way. Telling YouTube you're going to stop using their services, telling YouTube you're going to stop using YouTube premium. I mean, I think the only way to make a dent in these gigantic tech companies is to just stop using their product. And they've made it difficult to do that. But I think it's the only way is to just stop using their product completely. And what's your message to YouTube if they're watching right now? If they're watching right now, just please apply your rules fairly and evenly. That's all anybody is asking for. And in the event that something like a strike occurs, let that person who got a strike communicate with a human to get to the bottom of it, to see if it really is breaking the rules and a human agrees that it's breaking the rules or that a large language model AI bot believes that you broke the rules. more human interaction would go a long way with creators. I can't think of a creator off the top of my head right now that feels comfortable and at home on YouTube, and that is inside and outside of the THR space. All I have seen on Twitter recently is gamers, people who stream video games, having their channels deleted for fraud. What does that mean? When you ask YouTube what fraud is, they just give you a big list of the rules. I mean, imagine being arrested and sitting in front of a judge asking what you've been arrested for, and the judge just says, well, you broke the law. And you say, well, what law did I break? And they just hand you a book of rules. It's like these, you didn't follow these enough. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense.