President Donald Trump faced widespread social media bans in the wake of last week’s violent breach of the U.S. Capitol building by a mob of his supporters.
Now, YouTube has joined the growing list of Big Tech firms to take action against the president, dropping the hammer with a temporary ban on uploads to his official account, the Washington Examiner reports.
Blaming Trump
According to the Examiner, the Google-owned streaming service announced its decision to implement at least a weeklong suspension after similar bans put in place by sites including Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook’s move involved a temporary suspension of Trump’s profile while Twitter announced a permanent ban.
For YouTube’s part, an announcement on Tuesday confirmed he had received an initial “strike” against his channel. Under the platform’s rules, three strikes within a 90-day period can result in a permanent suspension.
As it stands, the president will be prevented from uploading new videos for a week — until President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration — and comments to existing videos have been disabled.
The company offered a rather opaque rationale for its decision, as has become customary among social media sites taking such action against a sitting president.
YouTube ban “may be extended”
YouTube declared that some of the president’s most recent videos “incited violence,” though the public statement did not reveal which ones or what specific language violated its user policies.
“After careful review, and in light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence, we removed new content uploaded to the Donald J. Trump channel and issued a strike for violating our policies for inciting violence,” the company stated, according to Axios.
The seven-day ban “may be extended” and prevents the account “from uploading new videos or livestreams” to the platform, according to YouTube.
Of course, this is just one of several such decisions among Big Tech firms intent on purging the president and his allies from the internet. Trump himself slammed the effort as a “catastrophic mistake” while speaking on the subject during a trip to Texas on Tuesday.
The tech backlash is not limited to social media, though, as evidenced by decisions like that of Airbnb to cancel reservations in the D.C. area and various lending institutions that will no longer do business with the president, as Reuters notes.