YouTube restricted access to a video produced by the Capital Research Center, apparently for promoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s dangerous ideas on equality.
The platform’s new content guidelines are taking their toll on content creators, flagging otherwise innocuous videos as dangerous—and it’s impossible to tell if the video was automatically flagged by the system, or if a moderator made the call.
Last week, Joseph Klein produced a video called “Right-Wing or Left-Wing, Identity Politics is Destroying America” for Capital Research Center, an American conservative think tank. Klein describes the three-minute video as a “critique of the identity politics driving liberals and conservatives even further apart.”
Klein makes the same case Martin Luther King Jr. did in his famous speech about judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Shortly after uploading it, YouTube placed the video in “limited content mode,” blocking it from view in the United Kingdom and 27 other countries.
In the United States and other countries where the video was still partially available, it was locked behind a warning message requiring users to sign in.
According to Klein, his video was twice given a manual review and confirmed to contain “inflammatory religious or supremacist content.” It was quietly reinstated after Fox News reached out to YouTube to inquire about the issue. Google claimed that the restriction was in error, which is unlikely, given the prior manual reviews.
The video is watchable on Facebook.
Much like the official Polish government video on mass immigration, which was also quarantined by YouTube, the video did not allow its users to “like” or comment on it. Likewise, there was no way to find it in the search engine and is only accessible through a direct link.
“Throughout the video, I criticize identity politics on both ends of the political spectrum, from college activists to alt-right Internet trolls,” writes Klein for the Washington Examiner. “Despite my attempts to remain nonpartisan, I am a libertarian working at the right-leaning Capital Research Center, and it’s likely my bias is detectable. And this fits a growing trend of center-right videos being placed in ‘limited content mode’ or otherwise restricted.”
The Capital Research Center video is only the latest video to be censored on YouTube. The incident follows PragerU’s videos, which had at least 37 of their videos placed into a limited state.
Source: dangerous.com
