Last October, we uploaded to our Youtube account a copy of U.S. Senate candidate Ron Hanks’ campaign kickoff video–the video made famous by its ending in which Hanks detonates an old copy machine labeled “DOMINION VOTING MACHINE” with a rifle shot after laying out his case that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Because we are set up to easily use YouTube videos, we re-uploaded the video to our account after having noticed that Hanks hadn’t uploaded it there himself.
Yesterday, we found out the hard way why Hanks’ campaign kickoff video is not on his YouTube account:
That’s because the video violates YouTube’s Community Guidelines against the posting of misinformation about the 2020 elections. As we said in our appeal response you can mostly see above, amplification of Hanks’ misinformation was not our interest in uploading this video, rather the exposure of Hanks’ misinformation. With that said, we recognize in hindsight that this video was not properly disclaimed in the title and description as such–and there is a case to be made that without titling and even editing this video to clearly call out falsehoods therein for any who stumble upon it, we may well have earned Youtube’s ire.
Because this is the first time in our many years of using YouTube that we’ve run afoul of their Community Guidelines, it looks like we’re getting off with a warning–and we appreciate the opportunity to do better. It’s our hope that they’ll understand our intentions upon review of the case and restore our unblemished record.
And it’s another reminder: in our news bubble, we laugh at Ron Hanks. But we’re not everyone watching.
I hate to say it Pols but Youtube did its job correctly this time. In the future you need to put BULLSHIT across the bottom or otherwise make it clear throughout that it's misinformation. Otherwise it just spreads.