YouTube censoring videos – on censorship!

YouTube has yet again censored another educational video from Prager University. The content of the banned video? Criticism of censorship; hopefully the irony of their choice  to remove it isn’t lost on YouTube’s executives.

The video, titled The Dark Art of Political Intimidation, was released last week and features Kimberly Strassel. Strassel is a Wall Street Journal columnist who explains tactics commonly used by the leftists to shut down free speech from the right. This included blackmail, harassment and intimidation.

Back in 2010, the IRS started to target conservative non-profit organizations intentionally. Groups were experiencing heavy delays when trying to aquire tax exempt non-profit status. This was an attempt to curb their political involvement in the 2012 election, explained Strassel.

A Democratic prosecutor in Wisconsin launched a shadow campaign of financial investigation against conservatives. Their houses were raided before sunrise, with accompanying gag orders to keep them quiet about the raids. The reason for all that was revenge for supporting the Republican Governor Scott Walker.

Kimberly Strassel highlights even more examples in the five-minute video showing censorship of political opponents. Youtube placed the video into restricted mode — which is a common filter used by schools, libraries and parents to shield their children from outrageously obscene and graphic content.

NewsBusters reports:

“Conservative radio host Dennis Prager’s idea for PragerU is to give students alternative, non-progressive takes on history, civics and other issues. there’s no cursing, no violence or any kind of indecency in any of them.”

Prager University’s videos including those that have been censored are all G rated. This leaves questions about why the popular video platform is placing restrictions on them. At least 21 additional videos produced by the conservative not for profit educational organization that is Prager University have been placed into restricted mode by Youtube.

There is a petition circulating to stop the censorship, which has aquired over 76,000 signatures so far. Hopefully, YouTube will get its act together about restricting videos that pose no threat to children. Better yet, they should make some key changes to their algorithms to prevent this from happening in the future.

A Youtube statement given to Wall Street Journal stated, “[V]ideo restrictions are decided by an ‘algorithm’ that factors in ‘community flagging’ and ‘sensitive content.’” Basically progressives tripped the algorithm in an attempt to limit free speech and political involvement from conservatives. YouTube has lifted the restriction on  The Dark Art of Political Intimidation this past weekend, thanks to the Wall Street Journal giving them a very hard time over the censorship.

Sources:

TheFederalist.com

NewsBusters.org