Social Media giant YouTube Bans channels that deal in crypto currency
Let’s see a tweet:
🚨🚨🚨
The Bankless @YouTube account ‘has been terminated’
🪓
No warning.
No notification.
No justification150,000 subs
10,000+ hours of contentHey @YouTube, our community would like a word!
RETWEET to let YouTube hear you: It’s not okay to ban crypto content pic.twitter.com/MJQ4MGwtYD
— Bankless 🏴 (@BanklessHQ) May 8, 2022
From the above, it is quite evident that, YouTube, banned the account of Bankless, a channel that deals in educating the subscribers with cryptocurrency and its market. Not only Bankless, but multiple channels that deal with crypto currency were banned in YouTube.
The Use of social media for CryptoCurrency:
While we all know, both social media and cryptocurrency have merged out of one common technological development which is digital development. While social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook play an important role in educating their users with valuable information, cryptocurrencies have come out to become the digital currency of the world. Crypto Currency exchanges use digital media to a large extent to inform about the changes in the currencies.
What happens, when one digital medium takes on another digital medium?
We all have read about many content creators dealing in crypto currency complaining about bans, restrictions imposed by social media platforms with out any proper explanation. This kind of bans generally affect the market of Cryptocurrency drastically. No proper information is passed at the correct time leading to major loss for both the user dealing in cryptocurrencies and the content creator.
Why did YouTube ban channels deal with crypto currency? Let’s find out!
YouTube has a mountain of privacy policies that the content creator needs to follow while publishing the content. If the content violates even one of the privacy policy, strict measures are taken against such content and the channel. For example, a few years ago, YouTube had banned channels of two reputed content creators namely – “Ivan on Tech” and “The Moon” citing a breach in company’s privacy policy.
Let’s follow The Moon’s Case study!
The Moon received after a lot of tweets got an update from YouTube. The advisory of YouTube stated that there was nothing wrong with the content that was uploaded but the title of the video which said “Warning!! Financial Crisis has begun! Bitcoin not a safe haven in this bloodbath?” was inappropriate and were violating “Sale of goods and services policy.” The YouTuber, who had around 89,000 subscribers then, explained that while Bitcoin was censorship resistant, YouTube videos weren’t.
What happened to the Bankless case?
After a lot of tweets and protests by Bankless, YouTube unbanned the channel. Following the unban, the content creator, Ryan Adams, tweeted to the CEO of YouTube Susan Wojcicki thanking him for unbanning his channel and requested him to come to his podcast to discuss about the issue. Once Ryan found out that other channels dealing with crypto currency were banned. He showed his displeasure in a tweet that read “They can deplatform you any time for any reason and they don’t have to tell you why. This is why we need Web3.” He also tweeted that “We all need to switch to Web3social to keep our freedom of speech.”
