10/28/2017 / By JD Heyes
The media establishment’s war on independent publishers is continuing unabated as yet another indy news site, Activist Post, is reporting that YouTube pulled its channel without warning and without a good reason.
According to the site:
A couple of weeks ago we were surprised to find our YouTube channel completely deleted with the message, “This account has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy against spam, deceptive practices, and misleading content or other Terms of Service violations.” Prior to having our channel seized, we were in perfect standing with YouTube.
The site noted further that the site’s channel was also in the YouTube Partners program because most of its content was advertiser-friendly. There were no complaints or strikes against the account, so the ban came essentially out of nowhere.
“All content was original or posted with permission,” Activist Post reported. “There were no personal attacks.”
That said, site managers believe they know why they were censored.
“If anyone was offended by our content, they were offended by ideas about peace and individual freedom,” they noted, adding that it’s becoming more common to ban their material following the removal from two major Internet advertising networks: Google Ad Exchange and Amazon’s CPM Ads program, “both of which we had been using for some time without issue.” [Editors direct readers to the rest of that story here.]
“This was a wake-up call! We are living in a time when ideas are so powerful that information gatekeepers (Google and Facebook) must act like tyrants to maintain control. Perhaps they’re a bigger threat to free speech than governments themselves. But working in concert with government makes them even more dangerous,” Activist Post reported further, noting that YouTube also denied the site’s appeal.
“Thank you for your account suspension appeal,” the email from YouTube stated. “We have decided to keep your account suspended based on our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service.”
But again, as Activist Post editors note, there were no violations of ‘terms of service.’ Only violations of toeing the establishment line on every single issue.
RT.com‘s Lori Harfenist noted in a broadcast that YouTube never provided Activist Post with any concrete examples of policy violations or “strikes,” and actually declined to do so.
“It’s just, one day the channel is there and then the next, poof, YouTube disappeared it,” she said. “Welcome to the new world of the Internet.” (Related: The ten timeless principles that drive the mission of Natural News and the Health Ranger… (and made us an enemy of the deranged status quo.)
She went on to note that YouTube had earlier demonetized some of Activist Post’s videos just as the social media site has done in the past with other news sites that present “radical” or just “alternative” views that don’t comport with the Left-wing establishment.
Earlier this year Google delisted all Natural News pages from its gigantic search engine, claiming nondescript violations of policy that, again, it couldn’t back up.
“For the record, there was never any allegation or evidence that Natural News had intentionally violated Google’s webmaster guidelines,” wrote site founder and editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, in February. “While Google said we were being flagged for a so-called “sneaky mobile redirect” on a very small number of pages in a subdomain (blogs.naturalnews.com) which were created by outside bloggers, Google went to the extraordinary step of banning the entire NaturalNews.com root domain and all its subdomains — a step that would never have been applied to CNN, Huffington Post or other popular news websites.”
After six days the search giant finally re-listed all Natural News pages, but the arbitrary act of censorship provided a clear indication of why alternative news organizations need to find and develop alternative media search and video sites like GoodGopher.com and Censored.news.
In addition to being a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, J.D. Heyes is editor-in-chief of The National Sentinel.
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Tagged Under: Activist Post, ban, Censorship, Google, independent news, information gatekeepers, oppression, political correntness, YouTube