Culture
YouTube Moves to Demonetize Mukbang and Big-Eating Videos
Google-owned YouTube tightened its community guidelines and ad-monetization rules over content that promotes eating disorders and binge eating, and channels handling extreme big-eating and the Korea-born 'mukbang' genre have seen monetization cut and videos removed. One creator with around 440,000 subscribers said their channel was demonetized and paused uploads. The policy targets eating-disorder-promoting content rather than banning all mukbang outright, so headlines saying big-eating YouTubers are now jobless overstate it. Japanese reactions swung between welcoming the health rationale and worrying about over-broad, AI-driven takedowns.