"I saw a yellow dollar sign. At first I didn't understand what it was," Uziel says. "Then I moved my cursor over it. I saw it meant my video was not advertiser-friendly."

By then, Uziel had made and posted close to a dozen videos to a YouTube channel called Real Women Real Stories—women speaking frankly into a camera about their experiences of sexual abuse. The view counts on some of the videos had climbed into the thousands, qualifying them for pre-roll ads placed through YouTube's advertising program. They were bringing Uziel and his team a modest amount of money. But Google was now pulling the plug. The company would not let ads run on his latest video—and eventually all the others. The problem, he was told: the "sensitive nature" of the videos.

Uziel sent an appeal to Google, but the company denied it. A Google representative told Uziel in an email that the videos' titles could be automatically triggering the site's filters. But Uziel says he never got a full explanation from the company of what really got the ads pulled from his videos.