YouTube removed and then restored a video from campus news site the College Fix depicting a far-left activist attacking an activist associated with the conservative student organization Turning Point USA.
According to The College Fix, YouTube removed the video and issued its channel with a temporary community guidelines strike — when a channel accumulates three such strikes over a certain period of time, it gets banned, and even a single strike can hamper a channel’s access to certain features of the platform.
In a comment to Breitbart News, a Google spokesman said that the video is now once again live on the platform.
The temporarily removed video depicts a far-left activist punching a member of Turning Point in the face and threatening to “shoot his ass.” The activist had been peacefully canvassing students at UC Berkeley to train TPUSA student members on recruitment.
The College Fix’s Twitter account posted a picture of the message they received from YouTube informing them of the video takedown and the community guidelines strike.
— The College Fix (@CollegeFix) February 23, 2019
Breitbart News has previously exposed an escalation of political bias at YouTube. Internal messages from Google obtained by Breitbart News revealed that YouTube manually intervened to promote officially verified sources from the mainstream and left-wing media over pro-life and conservative videos in search results for “abortion” and “abortions,” an action that one Google employee called a “smoking gun” proving political bias on the part of the tech giant.
The change occurred shortly after a left-wing writer at Slate contacted the company to complain about the prominence of pro-life content in search results.
Further messages obtained by Breitbart News revealed that YouTube also intervened in search results for Democrat politician Maxine Waters and progressive anti-gun activist David Hogg.
YouTube has not changed course following the exposure of its search manipulation, instead opting to double down. The tech giant recently announced that it would censor recommended videos to stop “misinformation.” The announcement came shortly after far-left news outlet BuzzFeed published an article criticizing the company for promoting controversial content in recommended videos.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter, Gab.ai and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
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