‘Legal Insurrection’ YouTube Channel Removed: Is Google Targeting Conservatives?
The Legal Insurrection YouTube Channel has been removed for allegedly violating the copyright on a video, Fox News reports.
The move by the Google-owned company comes at a time of divisiveness in American politics that saw President-elect Donald Trump win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote.
While Hillary Clinton came out ahead by approximately 2.9 million raw votes, Trump won more than 80 percent of the geographical U.S. and secured more than enough electoral votes to win on Nov. 8.
Set against that backdrop, many Legal Insurrection followers — the site has hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month — believe Google is targeting conservatives for something it allows in most other instances.
Legal Insurrection’s 10 Most Viewed Posts of 2016 https://t.co/PU3uM4QSnI pic.twitter.com/6jvSjc2NGk
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) December 30, 2016
Legal Insurrection founder William Jacobson, also a Cornell University law professor, told the news site that it is “very frustrating,… very scary, to have 8 years of content removed without a chance to defend yourself.”
According to Jacobson, YouTube took down his channel immediately with no notice or chance to correct any complaints that might have arisen over fair use clips from other news sites.
The offending video was only one, he said, and it originated from the Modern Languages Association (MLA) “based on audio posted of a recent MLA vote on a resolution to boycott Israeli universities,” Fox News reports, adding that the boycott resolution at the MLA Delegate Assembly ultimately failed.
“Clearly this was a politically motivated move. I never received any request or complaint from MLA. These were perfectly legitimate fair use excerpts with great news value,” Jacobson added.
As a result of the action, Jacobson believes his Legal Insurrection channel was removed in “an attempt to silence our reporting on a matter of great public importance,” and he said the site intends to pursue “all available remedies, and call on YouTube to restore our account.”
The Legal Insurrection case is not the first time in recent history that a conservative has cried foul on liberal media bias. Notably, Twitter recently came under fire from individuals on the right for banning conservative gay icon and Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos for what it determined to be online bullying of comedienne and actress Leslie Jones.
Yiannopoulos had ribbed Jones for the box office failure of the Ghostbusters reboot in 2016, which touched off a firestorm of bigoted tweets from individuals not connected to Yiannopoulos.
Newly added: #LoveForLeslieJ: Fans Stand with Leslie Jones After Cyber Bully Attack https://t.co/GflxCB1yC3 pic.twitter.com/qoSJXgjz8h
— Hollywood Unlocked (@HwoodUnlocked) July 21, 2016
Twitter traced the influx of tweets back to him, however, and issued a lifetime ban. Milo has claimed the decision was “great for my career,” but has opposed it on the grounds that it assaults freedom of speech since Twitter is a widely used platform, and it appeared to be “picking and choosing” which voices were allowed to be heard.
Similarly, the decision to remove the Legal Insurrection blog has conservatives angry that such a widely used and adopted platform — Google now has well over a billion users — is being politicized.
For Google’s part, it has not responded to the accusations of bias against conservatives. The only correspondence released thus far is the official screed that the Legal Insurrection account “has been terminated because we received multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement regarding material the user posted.”
Jacobson argues that he has been in business with Legal Insurrection for eight years and that he made it that far by “taking copyright claims very seriously.” He also claims that with the takedown, he lost “substantial original content.”
Fox News and Inquisitr have reached out to the video-sharing giant for a response to Jacobson’s and other conservatives’ claims of targeting.
But what do you think, readers?
Are Legal Insurrection and other conservatives being unfairly targeted? Sound off in the comments section below.
[Featured Image (official logo) by Legal Insurrection]
