Tag: YouTube

YouTube Takes Down Conservative Podcast Network Tied to DOJ Russia Indictment

Daily Caller News Foundation
Lauren Chen

YouTube terminated the accounts of a conservative influencer and her media company Thursday evening, one day after the Justice Department indicated the company was tied to a Russian scheme to influence the 2024 election.

The accounts for Tenet Media and Lauren Chen were removed one day after Attorney General Merrick Garland held a press conference Wednesday announcing an indictment of two Russians in an alleged scheme to influence the 2024 election. A note on Tenet Media’s channel states that it “violated our Community Guidelines” and Chen’s personal account on the Google-owned video site was listed as “not available” Friday morning.

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Top Kamala Campaign Staffers Aided Biden-Harris Admin’s Social Media Censorship Efforts

Daily Caller News Foundation
Teenager on Computer

Two campaign staffers for Vice President Kamala Harris were previously involved in efforts to censor Americans for spreading purported “disinformation” about COVID-19 while working in the Biden-Harris White House.

Then-administration officials Rob Flaherty and Aisha Shah are named as having been involved in the government’s efforts to censor Americans in legal filings related to the Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit, which alleged that the federal government violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to censor content related to the pandemic and other hot-button topics. On the Harris campaign team, Flaherty is now a deputy campaign manager and Shah is the director of digital partnerships, according to their respective LinkedIn profiles.

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Pew Research: Many Teens Use Social Media ‘Almost Constantly’

Virginia Star Staff

A new study from Pew Research Center reveals that 1 in 5 American teenagers are on social media websites “almost constantly.”

As reported by Axios, the Pew survey, an online poll with a sample size of 1,453 kids in the 13-17 age range, recorded a significant rise in social media use among that particular age group compared to a previous survey in 2014 and 2015.

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Commentary: A Way to Protect Kids Online That Passes Constitutional Muster

Virginia Star Staff

A bipartisan group of senators is about to take Big Tech CEOs to task on Jan. 31, 2024, by having them publicly address their failures to protect kids online. And the CEOs need to! The harms social media poses to children are well documented and, at this point, indisputable—even by the companies themselves.

YouTube admits that it hosts harmful content for children and even calls for legislation to address the problems it helps create. YouTube’s CEO indicated as much when he published his “principled approach for children and teenagers.”

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China Ramps Up Crackdown on American Tech

Virginia Star Staff

Over the past few months, China has escalated its efforts to exert control over American technology companies by implementing new requirements, bans and restrictions.

The Chinese government is clamping down on American technology companies by throttling their already limited access to the country’s massive economy, according to new requirements, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The country has also challenged American technology dominance by developing rivals to the latest smartphones and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as announcing export limits to key metals in July.

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Meta’s Epidemic of Chinese ‘Spamouflage’ Propaganda

Virginia Star Staff

Meta recently took “what appears to be the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world,” off its platforms, according to the company’s quarterly Adversarial Threat Report released this week.’

The social media accounts that made up the covert influence operation — collectively dubbed “Spamouflage” — were active all over the world, including in America, major U.S. allies, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora.

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YouTube Repeatedly Censors RFK Jr. as Democratic Leaders Demand Reinstatement of 2020 Censorship

Just the News

The disputed 2020 election now appears in the rearview mirror for YouTube, which is now determining what users can see relevant to the next election.

The Alphabet-owned, video-sharing site and Google sibling has censored at least two videos, and may be throttling a third, featuring Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shortly after ending a two-and-a-half-year ban on questioning the “integrity” of the last presidential election, saying it accomplished little relative to the potential harm it caused.

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YouTube Reverses Misinformation Policy, Allows Claims About 2020 Election on Platform

Virginia Star Staff

YouTube reversed its misinformation policy regarding content about elections on Friday and will now permit content that questions the veracity of the 2020 presidential election results, according to the company’s website.

YouTube’s parent company Google has a policy that prohibits content “advancing false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in certain past elections to determine heads of government,” and Youtube wrote in December 2020 that it would remove content that “misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.” The platform will now “stop removing” such content about the 2020 election, per its website.

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Analysis: The RESTRICT Act Could Be Used to Shut Down Any App That Challenges the ‘Reported Result’ of an Election

Admin

The Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act (RESTRICT Act), S.686, contains language that could be used to shut down any website or app with more than 1 million users that challenges the “reported result of a Federal election” — threatening websites and apps that allow free speech on their platforms including Truth Social and Rumble, not just TikTok, the supposed reason for the legislation.

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YouTube CEO Steps Down After Nine Years

Virginia Star Staff

Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki will be stepping down after a nine year stint as head of the company, Wojcicki announced in a blog post Thursday.

Wojcicki initially joined Google, Youtube’s parent company, nearly 25 years ago and worked on several projects for the company — including co-creating Google’s Image Search function and advertising technology — before joining Youtube in 2014 as its CEO, according to the blog post. Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan will be taking over as the new CEO of YouTube, while Wojcicki will step into an advisory role at YouTube’s parent companies, Google and Alphabet.

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Truth Social Migrates to Rumble Cloud, Trump Platform Ready to Onboard Millions

Admin
person holding a smart phone up

Truth Social has completed a migration to a massive cloud computing infrastructure run by the video giant Rumble, clearing the way for the social platform started by former President Donald Trump to onboard millions of users quickly, officials told Just the News.

The partnership between two of the nation’s emerging free speech platforms — completed this week — means Truth Social will be ending its beta testing and controlled account creation and moving quickly to erase a backlog of consumers who have been waiting a few weeks to join the platform.

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Big Tech Censored Dozens of Doctors, over 800 Accounts for COVID-19 ‘Misinformation,’ Study Shows

Admin

Major technology companies and social media platforms have removed, suppressed or flagged the accounts of over 800 prominent individuals and organizations, including medical doctors, for COVID-19 misinformation, according to a new study from the Media Research Center (MRC).

MRC’s Free Speech America CensorTrack, an initiative that monitors acts of censorship across online platforms, identified over 41 instances between March 2020 and February 2022 in which doctors, scientists and medical organizations were censored, according to the results of a study shared with Daily Caller News Foundation.

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Google Kicks Dan Bongino Off Ads Platform Days After YouTube Ban

Admin

Google temporarily suspended conservative talk show host Dan Bongino’s website, Bongino.com, from its ads service, a company spokesperson confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation on Friday.

“We have strict publisher policies in place that explicitly prohibit misleading and harmful content around the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrably false claims about our elections,” the spokesperson said. “When publishers persistently breach our policies we stop serving Google ads on their sites. Publishers can always appeal a decision once they have addressed any violating content.”

The spokesperson added that while Google would not disclose the specific offending content on Bongino.com, the website had been subject to frequent reviews and Google had flagged content in violation of its policies.

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Dan Bongino Permanently Banned from YouTube

Virginia Star Staff

Conservative talk show host Dan Bongino had both of his YouTube accounts permanently banned Wednesday, a YouTube spokesperson confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Bongino’s second channel, the Dan Bongino Show Clips, was initially suspended and demonetized for seven days after Bongino posted a video in which he said masks were “useless” in stopping the spread of the coronavirus, violating YouTube’s COVID-19 misinformation policy. Bongino then attempted to upload a video within the seven-day suspension period on his main channel, resulting in a permanent ban for both accounts, a YouTube spokesperson confirmed to the DCNF.

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YouTube Demonetizes Video on Missing Chinese Tennis Star

Virginia Star Staff

YouTube prevented a video about a missing Chinese tennis star from receiving advertising revenue on Friday.

The video, titled “Chinese Star VANISHES After Rape Accusation I Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar” and appearing on the Breaking Points channel, was demonetized early Friday, according to a tweet from the channel’s host Saagar Enjeti.

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New York Times Hits YouTube for ‘Arbitrary’ Censorship After Left Wing Channel Gets Removed

Virginia Star Staff

The New York Times published an article late Thursday castigating YouTube for removing the channel of British left-wing news channel Novara Media.

The article, titled “How a Mistake by YouTube Shows Its Power Over Media,” criticized the tech platform’s “opaque and sometimes arbitrarily enforced” rules, describing the company as an information “gatekeeper.”

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Legislation Would Allow Pennsylvanians to Sue Big Tech Companies for Censorship

Virginia Star Staff

Two Pennsylvania state senators said recently they want to hold social media companies accountable for religious or political censorship.

Sens. Doug Mastriano, R-Gettysburg, and Scott Hutchinson, R-Oil City, said their Senate Bill 604, also called the Social Media Accountability Act, would create a private right of action to allow residents to sue social media companies like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter for banning or censoring their account due to sharing religious or political beliefs on the platform.

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Google and YouTube Will Demonetize Content Denying ‘Scientific Consensus’ on Climate Change

Virginia Star Staff
Person on Smartphone

Google and YouTube announced a new policy Thursday demonetizing all content that denies the scientific consensus on climate change.

Google will no longer allow ads for “content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,” the company announced in a support page added to its website Thursday. The policy, which Google will start enforcing next month, covers YouTube videos and websites that treat climate change as a “hoax or a scam,” content “denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming” and content “denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change.”

The search giant said it was implementing the policy due to pressure from advertisers, who didn’t want their products associated with content promoting climate denial.

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YouTube Deletes Ron Paul Channel, Rejects Appeal, Then Reinstates It After Getting Called Out on Twitter

Virginia Star Staff

YouTube deleted one of former Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s channels Thursday and denied his appeal to reinstate it, only restoring the account after Paul voiced his frustrations on Twitter.

Paul posted two screenshots on Twitter Thursday of emails sent to him by YouTube informing him his account “RonPaulInstitute” had been removed for “severe or repeated violations of our community guidelines.” A screenshot of another email appeared to show an automatic reply from YouTube informing Paul that his appeal to reinstate the account had been denied.

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YouTube Says Will Ban Posts from Prominent Anti-Vaccine Activists in Effort to Purge Misinformation

Admin

YouTube said Wednesday the platform is banning several prominent anti-vaccine activists from its platform as part of an effort to remove all content that falsely claims that approved vaccines are dangerous.

Amon the accounts being banned are those of Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to The New York Times.

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Chinese-Owned TikTok Overtakes YouTube in US

Peter D'Abrosca

After former President Donald J. Trump attempted to ban TikTok, a popular video streaming social network, the Chinese-owned company has overtaken Google-owned YouTube in popularity in the United States.

“App users in the UK and US are spending more time on TikTok than on YouTube, a new report suggests,” BBC reported. “Data from app monitoring firm App Annie indicates that average time per user spent on the apps is higher for TikTok, indicating high levels of engagement.”

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Commentary: The Battle Against Big Tech Is an Existential Fight for Conservatives

Virginia Star Staff
Person holding phone up in Times Square.

For Big Tech billionaires, these are the best of times, and the worst of times.

Why the best? Because the long arm of social media and online commerce has never reached further and deeper into Americans’ culture, spending habits, lifestyles, and worldview. Likewise, the net worth of these billionaires has risen to undreamed-of heights. COVID was, for tech barons, a blessing in disguise: it trapped Americans indoors, where they could do little else but browse the web, consume digital entertainment, and spend their stimulus dollars on imported Chinese doohickeys. Even as the dreaded virus has retreated, Big Tech has successfully locked in its gains.

Why the worst of times, though? The very rise of Big Tech has portended greater scrutiny. The debasement of Big Tech’s competitors and natural enemies—from brick-and-mortar stores to Trump supporters—has ensured that the drumbeat of criticism of social media companies and online retailers has never been more stridently percussive. 

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YouTube Deletes Video on Trump’s Big Tech Lawsuit, Blocks His CPAC Speech from the Platform

Virginia Star Staff

YouTube deleted the American Conservative Union’s (ACU) video featuring former President Trump announcing his class-action lawsuit against Big Tech, citing an alleged violation of its COVID-19 terms and conditions.

The ACU, which hosts the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), received “a strike” on their account from YouTube on July 9, preventing them from uploading new content for a week. This includes ACU’s CPAC 2021 Part 2 in Dallas, Texas, and Trump’s CPAC speech scheduled for Sunday, the organization said in a statement.

In the deleted YouTube video of Trump’s announcement of a lawsuit against Big Tech, which includes Google, he also cited a medical study on hydroxychloroquine as a therapeutic for COVID-19.

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Silicon Valley Tech Platforms Receive Failing Grades on Quarterly Censorship Report

Peter D'Abrosca

According to a the most recent quarterly censorship report card from the Media Research Center (MRC), most of the major Silicon Valley tech titans are failing to protect freedom of expression.

“By almost any measure, the first three months of 2021 were the worst ever for online freedom. Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Google, Facebook, YouTube and others proved to the world that the Big Tech censorship of conservatives is a reality,” the group said. “And they did so in disturbing, authoritarian ways that highlight their unchecked power over information and our political process.”

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YouTube CEO Honored with ‘Free Expression’ Award as Big Tech Silences Conservatives

Peter D'Abrosca
Susan Wojcicki

Despite its ongoing censorship and banning of prominent conservatives from its platform, the CEO of Google-owned YouTube collected an award for “free expression” last week. 

The nonprofit Freedom Forum, which describes itself as “celebrating the world’s champions of free expression,” decided that Susan Wojcicki met that high bar. 

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DeSantis and Doctors Accuse Media, Big Tech of Hiding Harm from COVID Restrictions

Admin
Ron DeSantis

The media, academy and Big Tech are suppressing facts about the harms caused by COVID-19 lockdown policies, especially for younger generations, Gov. Ron DeSantis and public health experts said in a “roundtable discussion” on the novel coronavirus Monday.

These powerful American institutions are also misleading their audiences about the public health results from Florida’s open approach, which contrasted sharply with most states, they said.

The potential Republican presidential candidate hammered Google and its YouTube platform in particular for removing his earlier COVID-19 roundtable with the same doctors, branding it “misinformation.” Even some Florida news stations had their coverage removed.

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YouTube Suspends Rudy Giuliani for False Election Claims

Virginia Star Staff

YouTube suspended former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani again for spreading false information related to the 2020 presidential election, claiming the election was stolen.

Rudy Giuliani was suspended for repeatedly claiming the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, who President Joe Biden unseated in November, Bloomberg reported. YouTube cited its “presidential election integrity policy” and its “regulated goods policy,” alleging that Giuliani had posted content facilitating nicotine use.

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YouTube Removes New Interview with President Trump, Citing ‘Presidential Election Integrity Policy’

Virginia Star Staff

YouTube this week censored a recent interview with former President Donald Trump, claiming the video violated its new standards regarding allegations of election fraud.

The interview, conducted by Newsmax anchor Greg Kelly, included claims by Trump that he himself was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. Trump has repeatedly insisted that widespread voter fraud and vote-rigging tipped the scales in favor of Joe Biden during the race.

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Commentary: The Social Media Purge Exposes Net Neutrality’s True Goal

Virginia Star Staff

For nearly two decades, Silicon Valley made net neutrality its highest policy priority. Under the banner of a “free and open” internet, Google, Facebook, and Twitter sought regulations to ensure the uninterrupted flow of information by treating every bit equally. Or so they said.

Beginning last Friday night, these firms and others executed an unprecedented digital purge of the social media and video accounts of their political rivals. After several years of accelerating suspensions and suppressions, this time YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter permanently banned a number of high-profile conservatives and deplatformed thousands of others, at least temporarily. Many of these accounts had nothing to do with last Wednesday’s heinous events at the Capitol. Yet their histories are erased.

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YouTube Suspends Trump Account for at Least Seven Days

Virginia Star Staff

YouTube became the latest social media platform to ban President Donald Trump, announcing late Tuesday that he wouldn’t be able to post new content for seven days.

YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, said it took the action against Trump because of the potential for violence to be sparked from his content. The massive video-sharing platform joined Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Reddit and many others in suspending or banning the president, Axios reported.

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Richmond Mom Accessed Explicit Content on School-Issued Virtual Learning Computer

Eric Burk

Richmond Public Schools (RPS) has tightened content filtering restrictions on school computers after Janet Kelly discovered she could access explicit YouTube content on her elementary-aged son’s computer. Kelly is pleased that the school responded to her concerns, but she’s worried about long-term harms linked to having children in front of computers constantly for virtual learning.

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YouTube to Remove Videos Challenging 2020 Election, but ‘Russia Collusion’ Videos Left Uncensored

Virginia Star Staff

Tech giant and Internet video pioneer YouTube this week announced that it will begin to remove videos challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election, a policy it plans to enforce even as numerous videos remain up challenging the outcome of the 2016 election in which Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton.

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YouTube Automatically Deletes Any Comments That Contain Certain Phrases Insulting to Chinese Communist Party

Virginia Star Staff

YouTube’s enforcement algorithm is automatically removing any comments that contain one of two Chinese-language phrases that are critical of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

Any comment posted to YouTube, which is owned by Google, that contains the phrase “共匪,” which stands for “communist bandit,” or “五毛,” which translates to “wumao” and stands for “50-cent party,” is deleted within seconds without notification to the user, The Verge reported Tuesday.

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JC Bowman Commentary: Exposed in a Technological Age

JC Bowman
classroom

An old and wise saying challenges us to: “Believe nothing you hear, half of what you read, and some of what you see.”  It is critical to examine issues from all angles, rejecting gossip, mistruths, bias or information not supported or misinterpreted.  Put what you see or read into proper context to make sure what you think you are seeing is factual. 

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