It appears that some mistakes were committed by new moderators at YouTube. As the video platform ramps up human-powered moderation, the new moderators appeared to have mistakenly removed or flagged right-wing videos and channels.
According to a Bloomberg report, they quoted a YouTube spokesperson saying that “as we work to hire rapidly and ramp up our policy enforcement teams throughout 2018, newer members may misapply some of our policies resulting in mistaken removals.” The spokesperson added that YouTube’s policies have not changed, and that “we’ll reinstate any videos that were removed in error.” YouTube spokesperson said that newcomers to the moderation team can “misapply” its policies, which then led to “mistaken removals” of content from its platform.
YouTube didn’t specify which channels were affected due to this error, but Outline, which first broke the story, provided detailed a wide range of accounts that were affected. Of those account, some were Anti-School and Destroy the Illusion, which were neck deep in conspiracy theories. Then there were some that don’t appear to be in obvious violations, such as the Military Arms Channel, which saw three gun videos being taken down.
Due to this error from YouTube, some conservatives, including some affected by this, have accused Google of trying to censor right-wing politics through purges like this. They also previously accused Twitter of doing the same thing, but later were debunked because Twitter was purging bots from its platform.
