YouTube, owned by Google, announced Tuesday, January 12, that it had deleted a video that Donald Trump had posted on his official channel during the day. Youtube also sanctioned the channel by banning it from uploading new videos for a week. “After studying the case and due to concerns about further violence, we removed a video uploaded by Donald Trump for violating our rules”, written YouTube, without specifying which video was concerned.
According to specialist journalist Casey Newton, Donald Trump’s channel had broadcast excerpts from his latest statements to journalists, the first since the invasion of the Washington Capitol on January 6, in which he spoke of “the immense anger” of his supporters.
“We have also disabled, without time limitation, the ability to post comments under President Trump’s videos”, also explained Youtube, which in doing so uses its system of graduated sanctions (“strikes”) against accounts that do not respect its rules. The first “strike” suspends the possibility of publishing new videos for a week; the third leads to the closure of the chain.
QAnon product withdrawals from Amazon
This is not the first time that a video of Donald Trump has been deleted from YouTube: last week, the video of his speech in Washington, during which the outgoing president had urged his activists to march on Capitol Hill, had already been deleted by the video platform. But this is the first time that the president’s official account has been suspended.
This decision is the latest in a long series of sanctions against the American president, announced in dispersed order by almost all major platforms for a week. Twitter has permanently closed Donald Trump’s account, like Snapchat; Facebook suspended its account for at least two weeks.
Amazon, which on January 11 cut the hosting services it provided to the pro-Trump social network Parler, also announced on January 13 that it was withdrawing from its online stores a series of articles related to the conspiracy movement QAnon. For more than a year, a reference book of this movement, which believes that Donald Trump is fighting in the shadows against a conspiracy of pedophiles and Satanists, has regularly appeared in Amazon’s best-selling digital book ranking.
Handicrafts sales department Etsy also announced that it had withdrawn from sale a T-shirt emblazoned with a skull and the words “Camp Auschwitz”, worn by at least one of the demonstrators on Capitol Hill, whose images have goes around the world. The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp memorial had asked the platform to remove this insulting object for “The memory of all the victims of Auschwitz”.
