Youtube canceled its permanent channel ban of a prominent Swedish nationalist political party after just one day due to massive online protests.
Alternative for Sweden’s (AFS) party leader, Gustav Kasselstrand, heralded the recovery of his party’s official channel as a major victory for freedom of expression and a huge loss for the establishment media.
"This is a victory for freedom of expression and a loss for our opponents," said Kasselstrand. “Youtube was forced to backtrack after the massive popular protests directed against the company.”
“We have shown that the people do not tolerate political censorship on social media.”
Monday’s permanent deletion of the AFS channel was linked to a video that said a local news anchor should speak fluent Swedish.
The posted video called out an anchor of a Swedish news outlet who spoke broken Swedish; this apparently violated YouTube’s community rules.
The AFS channel had hundreds of thousands of views and was the second-most-popular among the nation's political parties.
Regardless, the dangers of a sudden removal of a major platform for a political movement by a foreign company was not lost on Kasselstrand.
“We have repeatedly been censored on Youtube and other social media,” said Kasselstrand. “The fact that foreign private companies with a monopoly position are able to dictate what opinions and political parties who are able to reach the public is one of the biggest threats to freedom of expression today."
“Alternative to Sweden was the only political party to be banned for political censorship on social media.”
Correspondingly, a seemingly biased pattern of censorship from the media giant has been reported on by Infowars.com.
Recently, YouTube scrubbed a Tommy Robinson video citing "hate speech" as the reason even though the video itself was of Robinson detailing the censorship of his reporting.
(PHOTO: SvartPandra via Wikimedia Commons)
