by Eric Lendrum
In the latest wave of social media censorship, the video-sharing giant YouTube has banned 17,818 channels that it claims were associated with “hateful or abusive” content, according to Newsbusters.
In YouTube’s quarterly report, over 4 million channels were deleted from April to June of this year. Of those 4 million, 0.4 percent were accused of using hate speech. This also constituted over 9 million individual videos being removed, of which 1.2 percent (111,185 total) were called “hateful or abusive.” This period also saw the deletion of over 533 million comments.
Newsbusters notes that this rate of banning is “absurdly high, even for YouTube,” and that even the tech giant admitted to the abnormal amount of censorship, claiming that “the spikes in removal numbers are in part due to the removal of older comments, videos, and channels that were previously permitted.”
Last week, YouTube banned a handful of prominent right-wing YouTube channels, including “The Iconoclast,” “Way of the World,” and former Students for Trump leader James Allsup. These three channels alone had a combined viewership of over 100 million, and Allsup had accumulated nearly half a million subscribers before his channel was deleted; in all three cases, no reason was ever given for the sudden terminations.
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Eric Lendrum graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was the Secretary of the College Republicans and the founding chairman of the school’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter. He has interned for Young America’s Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and the White House, and has worked for numerous campaigns including the 2018 re-election of Congressman Devin Nunes (CA-22).
