'Intellectual terrorism': YouTube closes 18 Yemeni channels, others

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Al Mayadeen
18 Jul 2023 00:08
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The Yemeni Military Media accuses YouTube of "seeking to harness the media assets of the countries of aggression to serve their colonial project."

A Yemeni flag waves in the city of Taez (AFP)

On Monday, YouTube closed 18 channels of the Yemeni Military Media, the Ansar Allah band, the artistic and documentary production unit, and Rawdat Al-Shuhada, in an "arbitrary step", according to the Yemeni Military Media statement.

The closed channels had more than 500 thousand subscribers with more than 7 thousand videos and more than 90 million views.

The Yemeni Military Media confirmed that the recent shutdown of its platforms, as well as other national platforms, on YouTube, in addition to Facebook and Twitter recently, is a clear indication of "double standards and a two-faced policy by the management of these companies in support of hostilities led by the US-Saudi-Emirati coalition of aggression."

The Yemeni Military Media slammed the hostile move as an act of "intellectual terrorism", adding that YouTube is "seeking to harness the media assets of the countries of aggression to serve their colonial project."

National pages, accounts, and channels pertaining to Yemen have been previously subjected to constant closure, ban, and restrictions without any justification.

This move constitutes a violation of freedom of speech and expression. Besides, many of the closed channels happen to be art and music channels, rather than those that promote any form of political hatred or incitement.

The platform is playing a game of censorship but with the wrong rules, by making censorship selective. Rules in the general sense are one-size-fits-all, but YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter think and act otherwise.

For them, it is fine, for example, to keep on YouTube the Israeli anthem pertaining to the occupation killing thousands of Palestinian children and committing humanitarian crimes by the minute, but removing the musical content of a Yemeni band is crucial as it pertains to a country whose children are being killed and its voices are being silenced.