YouTube removed a parody video that mocked them last week, before reposting it following community backlash.
According to the New York Post, the video campaign, which was called “YouTube Can Do Better,” featured a “square” businessman as “YouTube,” and “was created by the Content Creators Coalition as an attempt to get the Google property to increase the ad revenue split with musicians.”
The video campaign’s “lead spot” was then reportedly “pulled from the video-sharing site less than 48 hours later,” with YouTube citing a “violation of terms & conditions.”
“After two days of widespread press coverage of our artist-driven campaign to pressure Google into treating artists more fairly, you suspended and are now censoring our account,” complained the Content Creators Coalition following the video’s removal.
Then, “just three hours after the video’s suspension — c3 received an email from Google announcing ‘good news!'” reported the New York Post. “‘Our specialist team has re-reviewed your account and found no violations of our advertising policies. Your ads are now eligible to run.’”
This month, PragerU announced a lawsuit against YouTube, and its parent company Google, over alleged censorship on the platform.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the lawsuit “says YouTube’s more than 30 million visitors a day make the site so elemental to free speech in the digital age that it should be treated as a public forum.”
“The suit argues the site must use the ‘laws governing free speech,’ not its own discretion, to make decisions about what to censor,” they reported, adding that PragerU “alleges that by limiting access to some of its videos without clear criteria YouTube is infringing on PragerU’s First Amendment rights.”
As previously reported, “YouTube has repeatedly censored PragerU on their platform, labeling political videos as ‘restricted’ adult content and even removing a video of ‘a Muslim man describing how he was raised to be anti-Semitic,’ branding the video as ‘hate speech.'”
Other conservative channels on YouTube have also faced routine censorship, including Legal Insurrection, which was suspended before being reinstated following coverage from Breitbart News.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington and Gab @Nash, or like his page at Facebook.
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