November Update: YouTube terminates Climate State again..

March Update: Another month another YouTube channel termination

UPDATE We would like to thank everybody who signed our petition (Over 500 so far!). While we did not directly reached out to YouTube, or got contacted from staff, we just noticed that our YouTube channel is back online! We also would like to thank all the people who started to support us via Patreon! We are very impressed! Thank You all for the great support!

This means that our channel got likely terminated due to false positive copyright claims, and that the YouTube expert who checked our appeal failed to figure that out. Can you make a living on YouTube How much can you make on Youtube.

Since YouTube, part of Google, shut down our main YouTube channel, without prior warning, and no ongoing violation, we tried to understand this move, and thought how we properly respond to this action.

YouTube shut down the largest climate science video channel on the Internet around the 29th of January 2017, when terminating https://www.youtube.com/c/climatestate

Visitors are now greeted with a blunt message, which leaves a lot of questions and room for interpretation. It reads:

This account has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy against spam, deceptive practices, and misleading content or other Terms of Service violations.

This certainly won’t help our reputation, but subscribers should know that we did not spam, that Climate State did not used deceptive practices, or published misleading content, quiet the opposite.

In our yesterday post we highlighted the issue, we quoted support staff which responded basically with a generic message, citing YouTube’s Community Guidelines. Which leaves room for even more interpretation. The support also basically told us that we are no longer welcome, when they advised us to no longer access, possess, or create a YouTube channel.

The YouTube support staff, repeatedly cited the community guidelines, even after we asked to tell us the exact reason.

I’d advise you to please go through our Community Guidelines, and be a bit more cautious, to avoid any such instances from occurring in the future.

Appreciate your understanding in this regard.Please let me know if you need any other assistance.

And we also learn

In addition, I’d like to also let you know that, this is beyond our control to make any changes, once the final decision has been taken by our experts.

This is strange because there are examples when terminated channels came back.

A source known as Infowars.com which many know for hate speech, climate denial and related content pointed out:

About 3 hours after this article was posted and following a wave of public pressure, Mark Dice’s channel was restored by YouTube.

The Infowars article goes on …

YouTube routinely censors content in response to requests from governments and law enforcement authorities.

As we reported in 2011, demands to remove information, including videos containing “government criticism,” are increasing year upon year.

YouTube complies with the majority of the requests, including the removal of videos which merely show political demonstrations. “YouTube occasionally receives legal complaints from governments around the world to block content on our site. After a review of the legal complaint and the content at issue, YouTube may block specific content in order to comply with local laws in certain countries,” states the company’s disclaimer.

The source appears to be a CNN article from 2012

Google reports ‘alarming’ rise in government censorship requests

In another, a separate law enforcement group asked Google to take down 1,400 YouTube videos (Google owns YouTube) because of “alleged harassment.”

Now, while we should not jump to conclusions immediately, we need to look at the timing, of a recent ban wave, and the circumstances surrounding it, which evolve around massive YouTube channel terminations, w i t h o u t explanation.

Why would someone target our climate related YouTube channel? because it was the largest and fastest growing climate focused channel on the internet, with close to 500 videos, over 18k subscribers.

Is there a concerted attack on climate science originating from the current U.S. Administration on government websites, and even extending to enforcement to web media content, ie. YouTube?

Around the 20th of January first reports surfaced that the White House removed climate change from their pages

Yesterday, we learned the EPA Has Started to Remove Obama-era Information related to climate change.

This makes for a very Orwellian conspiracy theory, basically confirming the worst case scenarios of big brother and censorship. However, we have no way to approve or disprove such theory, because YouTube keeps the reason for their channel termination a secret.

Related 2017 isn’t ‘1984’ – it’s stranger than Orwell imagined

We are not the only channel affected, currently many posts in the YouTube product forums are about users who got their channel terminated – often without reason. https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/youtube

In addition to terminating the climate science related channel, YouTube prevents access to all videos we’ve uploaded, around 280. Basically the work of 4 years covering climate related topics is suddenly gone.

Sign our Petition to CEO Susan Wojcicki to give us access to our content, and to reinstate our channel.

YouTube should release our created content and reinstate our channel.

https://www.change.org/p/youtube-youtube-should-release-our-created-content-and-reinstate-our-channel

How you can help us to keep creating climate related content

1. Become a Patreon, http://patreon.com/ClimateState even a small amount helps us to dedicate more time to climate reporting. No matter what, we are committed to provide climate reporting.

2. Donations will go directly to benefit our efforts. You can donate to Paypal email donate@climatestate.com (this includes the option to donate with your creditcard).

We were aware that owning and running a YouTube channel leaves you at the mercy of staff decisions, especially if you post content under fair use. What really hurts us is not the decision to close our account, it is the lose of 2/3rds of our climate videos, and the threat that we are no longer allowed to own a channel, leaves our second channel in limbo, again at the mercy of the YouTube support staff, and the YouTube experts.

What’s next?

We decided that the most important objective of Climate State shall be to secure existing and future climate science and related content. For instance The Pirate Bay, KickAss Torrents website or Wikileaks successfully prevented takedown efforts. We could begin streaming content, uploaded to various video streaming sites. Something like a free stream search engine like alluc.ee. We could also use torrents together with https://webtorrent.io a program to stream torrent content.

We are literally left without a choice, unless we want to sit idle and watch how climate denial content is still available, or hateful content

We currently test https://zeronet.io, according to the authors for open, free and uncensorable websites, using Bitcoin cryptography and BitTorrent network. However, while this seems to be a nice solution to prevent sudden removal of content, it does not yet cover videos.

We setup an account at a P2P Bittorrent YouTube website https://www.bitchute.com/channel/ClimateState The project is still in it’s beginning, ironically released on the day YouTube terminated us. Read more about BitChute is a BitTorrent-Powered YouTube Alternative

As a reminder, see our channel content – and what has been lost here

https://web.archive.org/web/20170118131347/https://www.youtube.com/c/ClimateState

Related

Facebook group of affected YouTube channel owners https://www.facebook.com/groups/100159710486707/

While we try to transition some videos over to Dailymotion.com we run into this problem.



Among the reasons why we plan to make our content entirely immune against any sort of takedown. Hence why we signed-up for a BitChute account, but they yet have to roll out torrent uploading. https://www.bitchute.com/channel/ClimateState/