Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gestures during a session at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Fabrice Coffrini | AFP | Getty Images
Google has suspended President Donald Trump’s YouTube account, which is the world’s largest video platform.
The Google-owned company said On Tuesday night, Trump uploaded content that violated his policies, giving him an automatic warning, which leads to a minimum seven-day suspension of uploading new content. He said he is also disabling the comment section.
Donald J. Trump’s YouTube account has 2.77 million subscribers and usually posts several videos a day of himself and right-wing media stations. The company has a three-scam rule before being banned permanently. The temporary suspension means that Trump’s account and existing videos will remain accessible, but he will not be able to upload new content.
“After review, and in light of concerns about the continued potential for violence, we removed the new content uploaded to Donald J. Trump’s channel for violating our policies,” the company said in a declaration on social media on Wednesday night. “Given ongoing concerns about violence, we will also disable comments on President Trump’s channel indefinitely, as we did with other channels where there are security concerns found in the comments section.”
The company did not specify which video violated its policies.
Under YouTube’s three-strike system, a channel will be suspended for one week after the first strike, two after the second, and closed after a third strike in 90 days.
The suspension of Trump’s account on YouTube comes after the violence on the United States Capitol by some Trump supporters on Wednesday, which left five dead. Politicians and the public are asking social media and technology companies to more closely moderate their platforms, which are likely to incite more violence.
Both Twitter and Facebook announced that they were suspending Trump’s account on their respective platforms – Twitter, permanently. However, Trump found an alternative solution and started tweeting from the government-owned @POTUS account on Friday, before it too was removed.
Google-owned YouTube announced on Thursday that it would suspend – a first attack – any channels that posted new videos of false allegations of electoral fraud, rather than warning them first. Later on Thursday, Alphabet officials asked YouTube executives to take further action against the president, criticizing them for not suspending his account and arguing that he would incite more disinformation and violence.
Google also removed Parler, a social media app popular with Trump supporters, from the Google Play Store on Friday, making it much more difficult for Android users to download and access the app.
YouTube is different from other social networks because videos can be shared on other platforms, which gives it a wide reach.