Donald Trump Banned From YouTube For The Rest Of His Presidency

YouTube is suspending President Donald Trump’s channel for a minimum of one week, after a recent video was found to be in violation of the platform’s policies.

This follows action taken by other major social media platforms in the aftermath of the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol building on January 6. Facebook has now suspended President Trump’s account ‘indefinitely’, while Twitter has implemented a complete ban.

YouTube will reportedly also be taking the additional step of disabling comments for videos on Trump’s channel. It’s understood that this suspension could exceed the one-week mark.

YouTube told CNN Business that a recent video on Trump’s channel had ‘incited violence’, and has now been removed.

Although YouTube declined to share details of this particular video, it did state that the decision would be revisited after the one-week timeout. YouTube has also reportedly taken down content from the White House’s channel for being in violation of policy.

A YouTube spokesperson has made the following statement:

After careful review, and in light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence, we removed new content uploaded to the Donald J. Trump channel and issued a strike for violating our policies for inciting violence.

As a result, in accordance with our long-standing strikes system, the channel is now prevented from uploading new videos or livestreams for a minimum of seven days—which may be extended.

Given the ongoing concerns about violence, we will also be indefinitely disabling comments on President Trump’s channel, as we’ve done to other channels where there are safety concerns found in the comments section.

As reported by Variety, out of the six clips that were uploaded to Trump’s channel on Tuesday, January 12, five were videos from the far-right One America News (OAN) network, which showed the sitting president making an appearance in Alamo, Texas.

On Wednesday, January 6, the day of the Capitol riot, YouTube took down Trump’s video addressed to rioters, where he told them, ‘We love you, you’re very special.’

In this same video, Trump also repeated false claims that the US presidential election had been fraudulent. YouTube stated that this video had been in violation of its ban on election misinformation.

This suspension means Trump will be unable to post any YouTube videos to his 2.76 million subscribers before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on 20 January.

According to YouTube’s policies, those who incur a second strike will receive a two-week suspension, while three strikes will lead to a permanent ban.

If you have a story you want to tell, send it to UNILAD via [email protected]