YouTube took action against Right Wing Watch, a blog that has been dedicated to conservative extremism. On Monday, YouTube removed its channel for violating website rules. The sources say that this blog had some of the most extreme statements from some conservatives and that they go against the website norms but later, the channel was reinstated on YouTube.
“Right-wing watch YouTube channel was mistakenly suspended but upon further review has now been reinstated,” YouTube says in a statement.
Right Wing Watch Youtube Channel
With the name “RWW Blog”, this YouTube channel is dedicated to monitoring and reporting right-wing political organizations’ activities. They aim to expose the agenda of the extreme right. This channel has been on YouTube since 2010 and has gained more than 50 lakhs views in the previous decade. It contains approximately 50,000 subscribers and respectfully asks their opinion not to be abusive or violent on their channel.
On 28 June Monday, the Right Wing Watch received notice of a permanent ban that says that the video clips on their channel violate the rules. They are examples of hate speech conspiracy theories and other prohibited content.
“Our efforts to expose the bigoted view and dangerous conspiracy theories spread by right-wing activists have now resulted in YouTube banning our channel and removing thousands of videos.”- Right Wing Watch said in a statement early Monday.
This is not the first time that YouTube has taken action on the RWW Blog. For example, in October 2020, one of the video documentaries related to the QAnon conspiracy theory was deleted by YouTube. A similar action was done in April 2020 when YouTube was all negative about the content related to the 2020 presidential election in the USA.
What did Right Wing Watch have to say in it?
Monday morning RWW blog received the notice of ban from YouTube. A statement was put on the YouTube Twitter account regarding the ban, but the channel was back online on Monday afternoon.
“We are glad that by reinstating our account YouTube recognizes our position that there is a world of difference between reporting on offensive activities and committing them.” Right Wing Watch Director Adele Stan said in a statement.
“Without the ability to accurately portray dangerous behaviour, meaningful journalism and public education about the behaviour would cease to exist.”
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“We hope that this is the end of a year-long struggle with YouTube to understand the nature of work. We also hope that the platform will become more transparent about how it used to determine whether a user has violated its rules which have always been opaque and have led to frustrating and inexplicable decisions and reversals such as the one we experience today. Nevertheless, we remain dedicated to its posing threatening and harmful activities on the far right, and we are glad to have YouTube again available to us to continue to work.” stand added.
RWW had also posted some screenshots on Monday morning about YouTube informing them that their channel would be permanently removed from the site due to multiple community guidelines violations. RWW had also appealed the suspension, but YouTube also denied it.
When our team talked to one of the senior fellows of the RWW Blog, he told us that the problem with YouTube has been going on for years and despite their actions to make it clear to the platform that their videos work to expose extremism and contain disclaimers YouTube denies to accept it. These issues, rather than being acknowledged, are only escalating over the past years.
YouTube has given two back to back strikes to the channel in April. Sources said that this action had been taken against the videos posted about prompting the watchdog to refrain from posting more content to the strike.
We think that YouTube wanted to ban the channel; that is, they found out an eight-year old video flagged it down and gave the channel a third strike, and that is how they took the channel down on Monday.