YouTube Blocked My Video Questioning Content Blocking Practices

Yesterday I hosted a virtual event entitled Re-Evaluating Social Media: Where do we go from here?, where we discussed issues surrounding social media including algorithms, content moderation and privacy. In an ironic twist, the YouTube Live video of our panel discussion was blocked less than 12 hours after our livestream. Below is a screenshot of the e-mail notification I received.

And another of the video details.

Why it would have been flagged as spam, deceptive, or a scam is an utter mystery (you can watch the full video on Vimeo, even if you can’t watch it on YouTube), but it does a perfect job of illustrating exactly what we spoke about in the video itself.

Want to read this story later? Save it in Journal.

As our panelist, Jihan Varisco of The Flip Side, says in our discussion: “I think it’s complicated because it’s not always that simple to define, sort of, bad speech, and you have the question of who gets to do that? Is…