YouTube has become the latest social network to suspend US President Donald Trump.
The Google owned service announced on Tuesday that it had pulled new content from President Trump’s verified channel and blocked it from uploading new videos for at least a week, citing violations of its policy against inciting violence.
RT reports: The video-sharing platform, which was the only major social medium still carrying Trump’s message after the president was purged from both Twitter and Facebook, did not rule out the possibility of the week-long ban being extended further.
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Comments under all videos on Trump’s channel have been suspended “indefinitely,” YouTube said, noting that this was a standard practice for the cases “involving safety concerns.”
The ban did not quite come out of the blue. Earlier on Tuesday, an umbrella group of civil rights organizations vowed to pressure YouTube advertisers to drop the platform if it fails to follow Twitter and Facebook’s suit in blocking Trump’s accounts.
“We join in with our coalition partners and ask that YouTube act decisively to help stop the spread of hate by shutting Trump’s account down,” the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which is part of ‘Stop Hate for Profit’ campaign, said in a statement, as cited by Reuters.
Jim Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, one of the nine advocacy groups spearheading the effort, claimed that YouTube told them it was “considering” their request to censor Trump. He noted at the time that if the video-sharing giant failed to join Big Tech’s crackdown against the president, it would pay dearly by having its ad revenues sliced as a result of the boycott.
