Video sharing platform YouTube is now facing a legal battle from several of its users who run channels who say they had their rights violated on the platform.
The actions come after YouTube’s crack down on QAnon related content.
These channel owners consisted of some people who had hundreds of thousands of subscribers and they are looking for a temporary restraining order to get their respective accounts restored.
The wording of the complaint is fairly straightforward, stating, “YouTube’s massive de-platforming, which occurred just three weeks before the 2020 Presidential election, worked to the severe detriment of both conservative content creators and American voters who seek out their content.
YouTube took this draconian action so swiftly that the Plaintiffs… received no advance notice and were not able to download their own content.”
The heart of this complaint questions the validity of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which is a measure put in place to help online portals like YouTube defend themselves against lawsuits that involve the moderation of content.
This is likely to be the center of the legal defense on YouTube’s behalf. Various conservative politicians have maintained that there should be a “duty of faith” clause added to Section 230 so that these kinds of lawsuits are more likely to succeed.
However, there is no current law in effect to combat this, making the actual nature on if such a lawsuit could be successful very uncertain.
YouTube’s parent company, Google, did make it clear they were committed to moderating their community without any bias.
The company has stood behind its current policies and maintains it deleted the accounts in good faith and in accordance to their company policies against promoting violence.
Google also asserted by saying it had a team in place to act against such channels that were controversial in nature regardless of the content owner.
On October 15th, the company updated its policies to be more strict on enforcing bans from controversial accounts that spread conspiarcy theories like QAnon.
The company decided it would “prohibit content that targets an individual or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify real-world violence.”
These modifications were put in place with QAnon in mind.
One of the channels, SGT Report, which is the main plaintiff in the lawsuit had actually been suspended in 2018 following the promotion of a conspiracy that Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin had been terrorizing a young child.
However, the account was brought back after many subscribers complained.
A second account, TRU Reporting, also has faced scrutiny after promoting several stories related to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory on Twitter and has also accused the Bidens of sex trafficking.
Of course, the spread of conspiracy related content is nothing new to YouTube.
As far back as 2018, the company added “authoritative” links on videos that discussed topics that had been ripe for conspiracy theories like the Oklahoma City bombing and the Moon landing.
This was done to steer users to factual information as opposed to the messages within the respective videos.
A year later, YouTube altered its own algorithms so that content with conspiracy theories would appear further down in the rankings and also cracked down on some popular videos propagating such theories.
Finally, the new lawsuit is brought forth as a rallying cry from conservatives who feel they have been targeted by the video streaming service and others in the tech world.
The legal document also mentions freedom of speech rights and the First Amendment, stating that these channels being banned prior to a Presidential election is a danger to democracy and harmful to the American public.
It remains to be seen whether or not YouTube will wind up in court over this, but it could be an important battle in the near future between big tech and its own content creators.
