YouTube Punishes The Media Line for Reporting on Violation of Children’s Rights
Our coverage of a legitimate news story 14 years ago gets TML a 90-day sentence in ‘YouTube jail’
A legitimate news story that has been on The Media Line’s YouTube channel since 2008 has been flagged as violating YouTube’s community guidelines and removed from the platform, earning The Media Line a “strike” that prevents the organization from uploading new videos to its channel.
The TML story in question, titled “Kids with Rifles and More on Hamas TV,” was published on our channel on Feb. 7, 2008. It reports on propaganda videos broadcast on the Hamas satellite television channel. Those videos include blatantly anti-Semitic content, instructions on stabbing techniques, and scenes of children holding assault rifles.
The video is said to violate YouTube’s child safety policy – as if a news organization showing a terrorist group’s glorification of the illegal use of child combatants was itself guilty of the war crime it was exposing.
YouTube says, “Content that features a minor participating in a dangerous activity that poses a risk of bodily injury is not allowed on YouTube. We review educational, documentary, artistic, and scientific content on a case-by-case basis. Limited exceptions are made for content with sufficient and appropriate context and where the purpose of posting is clear.”
It is hard to understand how this news report would not qualify as documentary content with “sufficient and appropriate context” and a clear purpose, for which an exception should be made. The TML report is not sensationalist or exploitive, and only briefly shows children holding guns, in videos that TML itself did not take but that were first broadcast on Hamas TV.
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TML is also far from the only channel to carry such content on YouTube. A few examples: the World Jewish Congress’ video Hamas Exploits Children For Terror, ILTV Israel News’ report Hamas Opens Summer Military Training Camps For Kids, and a report from Zee News titled “Children in Gaza out on the streets after Israel, Hamas cease-fire.”
According to the YouTube site, TML has one strike, which was applied on Aug. 11. As a result, the agency cannot “upload content, post, or live stream for 1 week. Your full privileges will be restored automatically after the 1-week period is over.”
Twelve days have passed and TML still cannot upload to its YouTube channel.
YouTube also warns, “3 strikes within 90 days can cause your channel to be permanently removed.” That 90-day probation period ends on November 9.
When a video is removed from YouTube, the platform offers a review process, which TML followed. At the end of the review, one can appeal or not appeal the decision to remove the video. Because the video is now so old and in the hope of expediting the recovery of its uploading privileges, TML did not appeal. The “offending” video from 2008 would remain unviewable but TML, it was hoped, would immediately get back its ability to share new stories with its viewers.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
The Media Line, like many news organizations, makes regular use of Google’s YouTube video-sharing platform to host the video content of its news stories. It has, since January 2007 and without a hitch, uploaded 1,048 videos to YouTube – most of them open to the public and visible to anyone who visits the TML YouTube channel.
That is, until this week.
The ban is causing egregious harm to the agency, and to the numerous news outlets globally that contract with TML and rely on its content.