World Net Daily | Conservatives wage war against tech giants over ‘discrimination’

YouTube

As for the Google-owned YouTube.com, conservative Dennis Prager’s organization, Prager University, has sued the platform for listing more than 30 of its videos under “restricted mode,” limiting access to the videos for many users.

“YouTube does not want young people to hear conservative ideas,” PragerU states. “… Many families enable restricted mode in order to keep inappropriate and objectionable adult and sexual content away from their children — not to prevent them from watching animated, age-appropriate, educational videos.”

During his nationally syndicated radio show on Jan. 9, Prager ripped YouTube for labeling an educational video on the Korean War as “pornographic.”

“They censor videos that are not on the left. Anyone who watches our 40 videos will know that their censorship is ideologically driven,” Prager said, explaining that his organization isn’t after money from YouTube but is seeking to get the platform to fix its policy.

“I want people to understand how serious this is. If we lose, it means that the greatest contemporary vehicles for an open society are closed,” he said. “The censorship is from leftists, and liberals have to decide if they are liberals or leftists. The greatest threat to liberalism comes from the left.”

Prager has said the YouTube problem will be addressed in an upcoming documentary film, “No Safe Spaces.”

In his weekly column published at WND, Michael Brown recently detailed some of his own struggles with YouTube, which are separate from the Prager case. Brown said the site had flagged a number of his videos as “Not suitable for most advertisers,” including the following:

1) Videos dealing with homosexuality: “Testimony: Jackie Hill Perry on Being Saved out of a Homosexual Lifestyle,” “Mainstreaming Gay on Prime-Time TV”

2) Videos dealing with sexual ethics: “Why Mike Pence’s Sexual Ethics Make Good Christian Sense,” “The Death of Manson” and “Biblical Sexual Ethics Make Sense”

3) Videos dealing with abortion: “A Feminist Atheist and a Nun Agree on Abortion,” “Dr. Brown Sets the Record Straight on Pastor Carl Lentz and Abortion”

4) Videos dealing with conservative politics: “Judge Roy Moore’s Vision for America”

5) Videos critiquing the secular media: “Don Lemon, There’s a Reason We Pray”

6) Videos about Israel and the Jewish people: “Is Donald Trump Fulfilling Biblical Prophecy about Jerusalem?,” “Martin Luther and the Jews” and “Has Christianity ‘Replaced’ Judaism?”

7) Other, spiritually based videos: “An 11-Year-Old Caller Wants to Be Sure He Is Saved” and “A Time to Mourn” (reflections after the Texas church massacre)

YouTube later approved the above videos after a manual review, but Brown said it began flagging his videos again, including the following titles: “Dr. Brown Answers Your Questions,” “Answers to Your Questions,” “You’ve Got Questions, We’ve Got Answers,” “Dr. Brown Answers Your Questions Live on Black Friday,” “Dr. Brown Takes Your Calls and Responds to Some Critics,” “Are There Things God Can’t Do?,” “What Is a ‘Biblical’ Worldview?,” “Does God Promise to Deliver Us from Suffering?,” “Who Are the 144,000 in the Book of Revelation?,” “What Do Jewish Millennials Believe?” and “Does God Predestine People to Hell?”

“Unfortunately, on a practical level, the moment one of your videos is flagged, you no longer receive any income for it. And once you request a manual review, unless it’s viewed 1,000 times in a seven-day period, it will not be reviewed,” Brown explained.

“And since we post so many videos and have about 36,000 subscribers (as opposed to, say, one million subscribers), a number of these videos will not meet this threshold, and so they will never be reviewed. That means that there is the ongoing loss of important income that we would have immediately reinvested in our nonprofit ministry to help us produce more quality videos.

“I do remain hopeful that with enough pressure from enough people, YouTube will make a course correction and do the right thing.”

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