YouTube has removed few videos that US President Donald Trump has posted on his Youtube channel and warned that any channel found to posting multiple times within 90 days with false claims on US election results will be permanently removed from the Google-owned video platform.
The move comes in the wake of the phenomenal storming of the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters on Wednesday and along these lines disrupting the constitutional process of counting and certification of the Electoral College votes of the presidential elections. Four people, including a lady, died in the clashes between protesters and police. “Over the last month, we’ve removed thousands of videos which spread misinformation claiming widespread voter fraud changed the result of the 2020 election, including several videos that President Trump posted on Wednesday to his channel,” Google said in a statement.
“Due to the disturbing events that transpired on Wednesday, and given that the election results have been certified, any channel posting new videos with these false claims in violation of our policies will now receive a strike, a penalty which temporarily restricts uploading or live-streaming,” it said. “Channels that receive three strikes in the same 90-day period will be permanently removed from YouTube,” Google said in its statement.
Trump’s YouTube channel has 2.68 million subscribers. Following the violence that ejected at the US Capitol after his supporters stormed the building, YouTube has removed most of his videos from the rally he addressed earlier in the day.
YouTube believes that those videos alleging far and widespread fraud in the 2020 elections violated its policies. YouTube said that grace period should lapse on January 21, after Inauguration Day. Yet, since the election results have been clarified, after a supportive of Trump crowd stormed the Capitol, the Google -owned video platform says it’s ending the grace period now.
Earlier, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg said that President Donald Trump’s accounts on its popular social media platforms – Facebook and Instagram – would remain suspended until the initiation of President-elect Joe Biden on January 20. Announcing the decision, Zuckerberg said the risk of allowing President Trump to keep on use their platform during this period is “simply too great.” This is unexpectedly likely Facebook has taken such an extreme step to ban and block the social media handles of a head of the State and that too of the United States. On Wednesday, Twitter also blocked Trump’s account for 12 hours and removed three of his tweets including a video.
