Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gestures during a session at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Fabrice Coffrini | AFP | Getty Images
Google has suspended President Donald Trump’s account on YouTube, which is the world’s largest video platform.
The company that owns Google dit On Tuesday night, Trump uploaded content that violated his policies and gave it an automatic strike, which entails a minimum seven-day suspension for uploading new content. He said he is also disabling the comments section.
Donald J. Trump’s YouTube account has 2.77 million subscribers and typically posts several videos a day from himself and from right-wing media. The company has a three-strike rule before it is finally banned. The temporary suspension means that Trump’s account and existing videos will remain accessible, but he will not be able to upload new content.
“Following the review, and in light of concerns about the potential for ongoing violence, we removed the new content posted on Donald J. Trump’s channel for violating our policies,” the company said in a statement on social media Wednesday evening. “Given the constant concerns about violence, we will also turn off comments indefinitely on President Trump’s channel, as we have done on other channels where security issues are found in the comments section.”
The company did not specify which video violated its policies.
Under YouTube’s three-tap system, a channel will be suspended one week after the first tap, two after the second tap, and will end after a third tap within 90 days.
The suspension of Trump’s YouTube account comes after violence by some Trump supporters on Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol, which left five dead. Politicians and citizens have called for social media and technology companies to more closely moderate their platforms, which run the risk of inciting violence.
Both Twitter and Facebook announced the permanent suspension of Trump’s account on their respective platforms. However, Trump found a solution and began tweeting from the government-owned @POTUS account on Friday afternoon before it was finally removed as well.
On Thursday, Google-owned announced it would suspend (a first strike) all channels that posted new videos of widespread widespread allegations of election fraud, rather than giving them a first warning. On Thursday, Alphabet employees called on YouTube executives to take action against the president, criticizing them for not suspending their account and reasoning that it would incite further misinformation and violence.
Google also removed Parler, a popular social networking app among Trump followers, from the Google Play Store on Friday, making it much harder for Android users to download and access it.
YouTube is unique to other social networks because videos can be shared on other platforms, which gives it a wide reach.