It ain’t easy being a YouTuber—at least, not a political one. The platform is a giant, Byzantine organization filled with secret rules and algorithms that content creators constantly fall afoul of. This is especially true for radical voices, who are incessantly shadowbanned and suppressed by the Google-owned platform. One person who has broken through the…

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter has taken action against the QAnon movement, deleting more than 150,000 accounts that promoted the conspiracy theory. This follows a similar crackdown by YouTube. The impetus for the decision was the storming of the Capitol Building on January 6, led by many adherents who believe Donald Trump was leading a fightback…

An academic critical media literacy conference warning of the dangers of media censorship has, ironically, been censored by YouTube. The Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas 2020 took place without incident online over two days in October and featured a number of esteemed speakers and panels discussing issues concerning modern media studies. Weeks later,…

The welding of American politics with social media may be the defining moment of a sea change that is taking place at the very top echelons of power in the United States and the world. In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. elections, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all revealed their inescapable ties to the establishment…

In mid-October, one day after Twitter and Facebook banned a story by the New York Post about a laptop alleged to belong to Hunter Biden, YouTube published a short announcement on its blog called “Managing harmful conspiracy theories on YouTube” where new “efforts to curb hate and harassment by removing more conspiracy theory content used to justify…

Social media giant YouTube announced yesterday a host of new measures it says are aimed at preventing any interference in the upcoming presidential elections. Chief among the list it wrote on its blog, is “removing content that contains hacked information, the disclosure of which may interfere with democratic processes, such as elections and censuses.” An example…

Where can you find daily news, videos, analysis and maps about the conflict in Syria?  Detailed reports about the conflicts in Libya, Yemen, and Venezuela?  News about the rise of ISIS in Mozambique?  The original analysis of events in the United States and Russia? SouthFront is the place, or at least it was before recently being targeted…

Big tech is again attempting to define the range of acceptable political discussion on its platforms; this week YouTube announced a number of changes in the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic, chief among those being that automated systems, rather than humans, will predominantly be authorizing or removing content in the foreseeable future. “As COVID-19…

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA — Press TV — the Iranian government-funded TV news outlet — has been “shut down” on Google’s platforms, including YouTube and Gmail. The move coincides with similar action taken against HispanTV, an Iranian Spanish-language channel. With increasing repression of Iran’s official vehicles of communication to the world, the country’s voice is stifled…

TIRANA, ALBANIA – Iran is once again being subject to double standards as part of an ongoing effort to deprive it of access to media platforms where it can influence audiences overseas – in this case, on Twitter. The effort has seen hundreds of Iranian accounts allegedly tied to Iranian pro-government “propaganda” efforts subject to…

MINNEAPOLIS – Amid efforts aimed at censoring independent media, internet giants like YouTube are now moving to censor information at the behest of local governments. Though the phenomenon is not new, it appears to be expanding, as shown by YouTube’s recent decision to block a video from the Empire Files, the teleSUR program hosted by…

AUSTIN, TEXAS – YouTube is apparently planning to deputize crowd-sourced online encyclopedia Wikipedia in a bid to combat the spread of disinformation, according to its CEO Susan Wojcicki. “When there are videos that are focused around something that’s a conspiracy — and we’re using a list of well-known internet conspiracies from Wikipedia — then we…