Google suspends Trump’s YouTube account, disables comments



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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gestures during a session at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Fabrice Coffrini | AFP | Getty Images

Google suspended President Donald Trump’s account on YouTube, which is the world’s largest video platform.

Google owned company said On Tuesday night, Trump uploaded content that violated his policies, which gave him an automatic warning, resulting in a minimum seven-day suspension from uploading new content. He said he was also turning off the comments section.

Donald J. Trump’s YouTube account has 2.77 million subscribers and typically posts multiple videos per day of himself and right-wing media stations. The company has a three-stroke rule before it becomes permanently banned. The temporary suspension means Trump’s account and existing videos will remain accessible, but he won’t be able to upload new content.

“Upon review, and in light of concerns about the continued potential for violence, we have removed new content uploaded to Donald J. Trump’s channel for violating our policies,” the company said in a statement. declaration on social networks Wednesday evening. “Given the lingering concerns about violence, we will also be turning off comments on President Trump’s channel indefinitely, as we have done for other channels where security concerns can be found in the comments section.”

The company did not say which video violated its policies.

Under YouTube’s three-warning system, a channel will be suspended for one week after the first warning, two after the second, and discontinued after a third warning within 90 days.

YouTube’s suspension of Trump’s account comes after violence on Wednesday on the U.S. Capitol by some Trump supporters, which left five people dead. Politicians and the public have called on social media and tech companies to more tightly moderate their platforms, which risk sparking further violence.

Twitter and Facebook have announced that they are permanently suspending Trump’s account on their respective platforms – Twitter. However, Trump found a workaround and began tweeting from the government account @POTUS on Friday night before it was finally deleted.

Google-owned YouTube announced Thursday that it would suspend – a first strike – all channels posting new videos of bogus allegations of widespread election fraud, rather than giving them a warning first. Alphabet employees later on Thursday called on YouTube executives to take further action against the president, criticizing them for not suspending his account and saying he would incite more misinformation and violence.

Google also removed Speak, a social media app popular with Trump supporters, from the Google Play Store on Friday, making it much more difficult for Android users to download and access the app.

YouTube is unique from other social networks because the videos can be shared on other platforms, giving it wide reach.



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