Social Media Tyranny: Legal Insurrection Terminated From Youtube

Youtube joins the fake news crusade. Does anyone see this shaping up to be a partisan witch hunt to suppress dissenting political opinions? Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have all sworn to crackdown on “fake news”, but the only channels, pages, and accts being terminated are conservative.

I have many loud-mouth, eager-to-offend friends who get thrown in Facebook jail all the time for saying things progressives don’t like. All it takes is a complaint from a leftist and facebook will lock your account, without any proof. This censorship is completely legal because these are private companies, exercising private property rights. Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s right.

Late last night YouTube blocked the channel of the influential conservative politics and law website, “Legal Insurrection,” citing copyright infringement claims.  The creator of the website, Cornell University Law Professor William Jacobson, told Fox News he was given no warning of the action and no opportunity to defend himself, saying “it’s very frustrating, it’s very scary, to have 8 years of content removed without a chance to defend yourself.”

Without notice, YouTube replaced Legal Insurrection’s channel with the following notice:

While the infringement notice from YouTube cited “multiple third-party claims”, earlier this morning, Legal Insurrection posted the following update to their website noting the complaint came solely from the Modern Language Association and was based on a couple of short excerpts borrowed from a 2-hour video from MLA that were “well-within fair use.”

UPDATE 1-13-2017 9:50 a.m. — I just received notice from YouTube that the copyright claims were filed by the Modern Language Association based on excerpts of audio of pro- and anti-Israel speakers at the MLA Annual Meeting we reported on in this post, Massive DEFEAT for BDS at Modern Language Association.

We intend to fight this both at the YouTube and legal level. It is highly questionable that MLA owns the copyright for oral presentations at the Annual Meeting, and even if it did, the limited excerpts we used from the nearly 2-hour video posted by MLA on YouTube are well-within fair use. What I think is really going on here is that anti-Israel activists at MLA complained to MLA that MLA had posted the audio on YouTube. MLA took down its own 2-hour video and now seeks to silence our reporting.

Which, of course, led Jacobson to the logical conclusion that YouTube’s decision was seemingly nothing more than the latest attempt of Silicon Valley’s liberal elitists to censor conservative media outlets, saying “clearly this was a politically motivated move…these were perfectly legitimate fair use excerpts with great news value.”