YouTube’s New Moderators ‘Mistakenly’ Delete Conservative Videos from Platform

Newly hired YouTube moderators have reportedly deleted videos from conservative channels across the platform, which the Google subsidiary is describing as “mistaken removals.”

Bloomberg reports that YouTube’s newly hired moderators, who were brought on at the company in an attempt to crack down on fake news, misleading videos and extreme content on the platform, have been accidentally removing content published by right-wing channels on YouTube. Google said in December that they would be assigning more than 10,000 new employees to moderate content on YouTube following multiple issues with extremist content on the platform — and advertisers becoming increasingly upset about their products appearing alongside certain content.

Following the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, the YouTube moderators deleted a number of videos from conservative, pro-gun channels. One channel in particular, Military Arms Channel, has received multiple warnings and strikes on their videos, resulting in the account owner temporarily taking down their channel in order to avoid further penalties from YouTube. Military Arms Channel boasts 700,000 subscribers and over a 100 million monthly views.

Jerome Corsi, who heads the Washington D.C. bureau of Alex Jones’ website InfoWars.com, stated that YouTube had removed one of his videos and disabled a live stream he was broadcasting.

Here we go. YouTube JUST REMOVED one of my @cbts_stream videos & DISABLED my LIVE STREAM for 90 days #QAnon #Qanon8chan CENSORSHIP or LEFTISTS attacking @realDonaldTrump WE NEED TO PROTEST YouTube @YouTube @Google RESTRICTING CONSERVATIVES ON INTERNET #InternetBillOfRights

— Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D. (@jerome_corsi) February 27, 2018

InfoWars official YouTube channel is also reportedly one strike away from being removed from the YouTube platform entirely. YouTube has since said that some of the content removed from the site was removed by mistake but did not address the issues faced by particular channels, such as InfoWars and Military Arms Channel.

A YouTube spokesperson said in a statement “As we work to hire rapidly and ramp up our policy enforcement teams throughout 2018, newer members may misapply some of our policies resulting in mistaken removals.” The spokesperson continued, “We’re continuing to enforce our existing policies regarding harmful and dangerous content, they have not changed. We’ll reinstate any videos that were removed in error.” YouTube has faced fierce pressure from left-wing activists to permanently ban the NRATV channel from their platform following the Parkland school shooting.

Breitbart has previously reported on a number of other right-wing YouTubers that have faced suspensions, strikes or bans from YouTube in recent months. Read the article here.