Everytown Just Told On Itself About YouTube’s Gun Ban

YouTube quietly tightened the screws on gun content again, updating its branded content policies in September 2026 to bar “weapons or ammunition” from “any content on YouTube influenced by a brand partner in exchange for something of value, such as featuring or promoting a brand’s products or services in exchange for payment, free products, or sponsorships.”

Translation: the sponsorship model that keeps guntube running just got a target painted on it. And thanks to a report from Everytown’s Smoking Gun project titled “Loaded Content,” we now have a pretty good idea of who’s been lobbying for this. The policy quote above sits in Everytown’s own report, celebrated as a victory as it was being written.

Why Sponsorships Matter So Much

Here’s the thing the gun-control crowd understands and hates. Firearms companies can’t buy conventional ads on the big platforms. Google, Meta, and YouTube all prohibit paid gun advertising, and major broadcasters like ABC and CBS won’t touch firearms spots either.

So manufacturers went another route. They sponsor guntubers who test, showcase, and endorse products on camera. A successful channel can pull in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through a mix of ad revenue and direct industry sponsorships. Some creators get free guns, ammo, or accessories for reviews. Others sign formal paid partnerships to feature specific products.

According to estimates from Oregon State University marketing researchers cited in the Everytown report, social media influencers drove between 1 and 1.5 million firearm sales in 2025 alone, worth up to $825 million in retail revenue. That’s a staggering number for an industry that spends less than one percent of its revenue on traditional advertising.

Everytown’s Angle

Everytown frames this as protecting kids, citing a 2023 report it says found creators push “hyper-aggressive and hyper-sexualized content” to minors and that undisclosed firearm endorsements are “ubiquitous on social media.” Their real complaint, according to the same report, is that influencer content renders the ad bans ineffective.

The report goes further than general hand-wringing. It specifically outs the Leviathan Group, a marketing firm based in Monroe, Michigan, that Everytown describes as “the most powerful behind-the-scenes force in the guntube ecosystem.” Leviathan represents a stable of prominent creators — the “Leviathan Tribe” — and brokers the sponsorship deals between them and firearm manufacturers. Naming the intermediary isn’t casual analysis. It’s a roadmap for the next round of platform pressure and, if you’re paying attention, potential litigation targets. This isn’t a group that stumbled into celebrating YouTube’s policy change while lamenting it. Everytown has been writing letters to YouTube CEOs since at least December 2021, pushing for exactly this kind of enforcement, and is funded to the tune of roughly $35 million a year with Michael Bloomberg’s money.

The National Association for Gun Rights called out the report’s slant on the day it circulated, posting that Everytown “cannot even get one paragraph in before they reveal their goals and biases” and mocking the group’s decision to invoke a mass shooter to argue that lawful firearm content is a problem.

Where This Could Go

Whether YouTube actually enforces the new policy consistently remains to be seen — the platform has a history of applying its firearms rules unevenly, and creators have been playing whack-a-mole with demonetization since 2017. But there’s a legal angle worth watching that goes beyond content moderation.

If a guntuber gets cut off and can prove a gun-control group’s pressure caused it, that opens the door to a tortious interference claim over existing sponsorship contracts. Everytown has free speech rights. Deliberately wrecking someone’s contractual relationships — while publishing a report that names the specific creators, sponsors, and brokers involved — is a different matter, and bragging about the win could hand a plaintiff exactly the evidence they’d need to bring one.