Hours after blocking news channel WION, YouTube now blocks volcano videos

The censorship team at YouTube, which was expanded by the induction of cast-in-wool recruits trained in censorship in China and North Korea last week is now operating at full efficiency. The team, which is tasked with blocking at least 100 videos every minute as a business unit KPI has since the last 10 days blocked over 1.5 million videos. Indian news channel World is One Nightmare (WION) was also blocked recently as part of that effort by the YouTube censorship team known internally as ‘the pinchers’.

While WION was blocked over a trivial issue, things got even messier this week as many channels that were uploading videos of a small volcano that had erupted over Iceland were blocked by YouTube on Saturday.  In a delayed statement issued late Saturday evening, YouTube defended the move saying “we have acted because clips of new volcanoes are violating our community guidelines, that prohibit content denying, minimizing, or trivializing well-documented violent events, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine as decided by the mood of our censorship team.”

It went on to say “as per this policy, we have removed content, for example, that takes the attention away from the real geopolitical volcano that has erupted in Ukraine. We will not tolerate the coverage of small volcanoes or natural disasters till things improve in Ukraine as such coverage will cause the diversion of attention and focus on Ukraine. Even our censorship team was mesmerized by the streams of silky red molten lava coming out from the Geldingadalur fissure near Reykjavik. It took some time, donuts, and plenty of coffee to get the team to snap out of it. So the team acting in unison decided to Reykjapitalize its censorship effort to curb the spread of such diversion”.

Clearing the air on any scope for any form of bias creeping in while censoring videos and channels, the statement added. "Our censorship team is filled with people from varied backgrounds who subscribe to the same ideology and harbor a similar outlook on various issues. Thus the question of bias does not arise at all. YouTube takes all allegations of bias very seriously. All appeals and allegations of bias are by default forwarded to the email address of any employee who is out-of-office or to an internal ID that is not monitored. So we encourage all those affected by such a move to file an appeal right away so that we can provide a fake assurance of concern".  

The affected users said they will move their content away from the discriminatory and weird platform to other social media outlets. A YouTube spokesperson we reached out to refused to comment as she felt her comments might divert the attention of the global community from the crisis unfolding in Ukraine and trivialize the conflict.   

A messaged received by a YouTube user