The move comes in the wake of the unprecedented storming of the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters on Wednesday.
|| Rhythima Agrawal
YouTube has taken down a new video uploaded on President Donald Trump’s channel and suspended President Trump from uploading new videos to his official account for at least a week, announced the company on Tuesday night. This comes after fellow social media giants Twitter and Facebook shut the president out of his accounts because of concerns that his posts will incite violence. The Google-owned video site was the last of the major social media networks to suspend Trump after the attack on the U.S. Capitol. It said it removed a video uploaded Tuesday for violating its policies and “in light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence.”
On Thursday, Facebook said it would cut the president off indefinitely, for at least the next two weeks. Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg later told Reuters that the company had no plans to reinstate the president’s account.
YouTube took down one video from the president’s account. A day later, Twitter banned him. YouTube has a three-strike process when deciding which channels to take down, which directly affects the speed at which it moves. Facebook also has a strike system, but big, complex decisions often roll up directly to Sandberg and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. At Twitter, decisions are made by the company’s policy team and signed by CEO Jack Dorsey.
The move comes in the wake of the unprecedented storming of the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters on Wednesday and thus disrupting the constitutional process of counting and certification of the Electoral College votes of the presidential elections. Four people, including a woman, died in the clashes between protesters and police. While Twitter permanently banned the president’s account along with those of his campaign, Facebook and Instagram issued an indefinite ban against him. Other platforms like Amazon-owned live streaming service Twitch and Snapchat have also disabled Trump’s account due to concerns over potential violence. The Trump campaign’s funding and e-commerce operations have also been hit after being cut off by payments processor Stripe and e-commerce platform Shopify for breaching the platforms’ policies on encouraging violence.
“Over the last month, we’ve removed thousands of videos which spread misinformation claiming widespread voter fraud changed the result of the 2020 election, including several videos that President Trump posted on Wednesday to his channel,” Google said in a statement. Trump’s YouTube channel has 2.6million subscribers. Following the violence that erupted at the US Capitol after his supporters stormed the building, YouTube has removed most of his videos from the rally he addressed earlier in the day. YouTube believes that those videos alleging widespread fraud in the 2020 elections violated its policies.
