Youtube Escalates Censorship

Washington’s Blog – by Eric Zuesse

America’s best and most reliable video ducumentarian of war-crimes and of lies by the U.S. Government is now being hit by a new Youtube policy of blocking income to, or even obliterating, videos that Youtube determines to be about “Controversial or sensitive subjects and events, including subjects related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters and tragedies, even if grahic imagery [unsuitable for children] is not shown.” (That’s from the statement by Youtube.)

He asserts that, “This change is essentially an attack on independent journalists who cannot afford the video and sponsorship infrastructure used by the corporate media.”  

He says that a “contact within Google [which owns Youtube]” has “checked into this for us,” and received from higher-ups the explanation that, regarding “the issue of your videos being de-monetized, your hunch about the video topics being war related is correct. According to our advertising policy, we do not run ads on certain types [i.e., on this  type] of content. …If you’d like to create advertising friendly content or need help with your channel, please let us know.”

His response to that is, “I’m not going to be silent about war-crimes just to avoid financial difficulties.”

However, “This latest move by Youtube comes at a very bad time for my family. For the last several months, we’ve been investing all of our time and resources in setting up a [inaudible] education center in a developing country in a very rural location,” and he is now tapped-out. “All of our savings went into getting that project started.” “Right now, we aren’t making enough money to cover food and rent, and our rent is only $700 a month.”

So, he reluctantly has decided, “We’re not going to hit the ‘Monetize’ button on this channel” (called Storm Clouds Gathering), “ever again.” He explains: “Money is being used as a weapon, so it doesn’t make any sense to hand them bullets.”

Therefore, he is “putting the future of this project in your hands” — the hands of the hundreds of thousands of people who use his site. His implication is that either he and his family will now survive on donations for the work they are doing to produce and post new videos and to keep the current ones up, or else he’ll have to abandon the project.

Google/Youtube isn’t telling him that they’le cut him off, only that — for a reason they refuse to state (other than that, “the issue of your videos being de-monetized, your hunch about the video topics being war related is correct. According to our advertising policy, we do not run ads on certain types [i.e., onthis  type] of content”) — they won’t allow advertisers on it.

In other words: advertisers who have books, bumper-stickers, or anything else they want to sell to his large and rapidly growing audience, will no longer be allowed to advertise there. His former sole source of income — those advertisers — has been cut off.

This incredibly brilliant and uncorruptible person — and, for proof of that, I refer you to this, for example, and to this, and this, all of those being about Ukraine; or else to this on Syria; as examples of the type of work that he has been pumping out entirely on his own, which have contained insights that led the way, things that he figured out before anyone else did, and which have been foundational for me and for many other  of the best investigators who post to the Web — he either will stop, or else will be audience-supported in order to be able to continue this work.

What Google is doing here is to squeeze-out a major resource for not only many of the most intelligent news-consumers, but for the independent journalists who have found him to be the first person to make the clinching case that exposes government lies as being lies. He is, arguably, the best investigative journalist working today. And he refuses to buckle to the mega-corporate agenda in international affairs. He is brilliant enough to be a growing threat to the manipulators of public opinion; and, so, they are now clamping down upon him.

The Executive Chairman of Google is Eric Schmidt, who, as wikipedia notes, “is a member of the Bilderberg Group and attended the Bilderberg conference in 2011,[86] 2012 and 2013.[87] He also has a listed membership with the Trilateral Commission.[8]” In my article, “How and Why the U.S. Has Re-Started the Cold War (The Backstory that Precipitated Ukraine’s Civil War),” I also documented that he attended the 2014 Bilderberg meeting, which was largely consumed with the Ukraine war and all the rest of the aftermath of Washington’s Ukrainian coup which in February 2014 installed a rabidly anti-Russian government right on Russia’s border, in Ukraine. I also listed there many other top executives and former government officials, such as David Petraeus and Richard Perle, who likewise attended in all of those years.

The individual who has been and is Storm Clouds Gathering, has now become a sufficient threat to their plans, so that the top member from Google (a company upon which he relies) is doing the joint work of all of them, by making difficult if not impossible for Aaron Hawkins to continue his work for the public — his work which threatens the collective goals of all of them against the public.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/09/youtube-escalates-censorship.html