tech2 News Staff

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s obnoxious PSA video, where he tries to make light of the death of net neutrality int he US, got pulled down from YouTube for seven hours.

The video, titled “PSA from Chairman of the FCC Ajit Pai”, shows Pai prancing around in a Santa suit while playing with fidget spinners, light sabers and assorted foods. He also does the ‘Harlem Shake’ in the video.

According to The Verge, the creator of the Harlem Shake meme, Baauer, filed a copyright claim against the video, forcing YouTube to take down the video. Baauer told The Verge that he was “appalled to be associated in any way with the repeal of net neutrality” and that he was exploring other avenues to take down the video.

Pai’s video was posted on a YouTube channel belonging to The Daily Caller. Following the take-down of the video by Google, which is standard procedure in the event of a copyright claim, The Daily Caller went all-guns-blazing for Google in an attempt to deflect the net neutrality debate to something that better suited their agenda. This came in the form of an op-ed titled “Google is using its immense power to censor content that doesn’t fit its political goals.”

(Also read: Right to non-discriminatory internet access is not negotiable, says Ravi Shankar Prasad)

The bizarre article talks about how Google “censored the video based on bogus claims” and how it took the “full force of our news site” to get YouTube and Google to “reverse this political censorship.” They go on to claim that it was only their “sizable contacts and resources” that enabled this to happen, and that an average citizen could never have been able to stand up to Google.

The site seems quite pleased with the fact that the “video was viewed millions of times”, featured in news and “spawned an avalanche of memes. As of this writing, the video hasn’t even touched the one million views mark and boasts of a likes to dislikes ratio of 7,000 to 184,000. On a related note, Justin Beiber's Baby is still the most disliked video on YouTube with over eight million dislikes.

The Daily Caller then went on to accused “the left” of orchestrating a campaign to “strip the video from the internet”.

Strangely enough, despite using the Harlem Shake in the video, the Caller described it as “an embarrassingly outdated internet trope”. To be fair, the one good point the Caller does make is that the video was taken down because someone “openly disagreed with the political worldview of the man dancing to it”.

But then again, who’d want to be associated with the man who killed net neutrality in the US?