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YouTube Cenorship Against LA CopWatcher is Censorship Against All

Pete Eyre 653 Views , , , , , , , ,

Recently Raven Nicole Masterson, who’s active with Cop Watch out in LA, made it known that a video she’d posted to YouTube was pulled after the police officer depicted complained. Despite the fact that Raven had not acted in the wrong, YouTube sided with the officer and ignored their own protocol for handling complaints. This seems to be part of a growing trend – YouTube’s automatic siding with police, rather than allow for transparency, in effect, acting as a reinforcement to the thin blue line by helping to censor police misdeeds. -Pete

In her own words:

Last week, I got a notice from YouTube, stating that the video you can see via on Dailymotion Was in violation of their privacy terms of service. I digress. The officer was out in public, and I have every right to record my interaction with them. To add insult to injury, I wasn’t even given the usual 48 hours notice that YouTube sends to people after a privacy complaint has been filed.


The Video LAPD Hates by ravenmasterson

I feel that this is a slippery slope towards LAPD or any other police agency for that matter, illegally and unjustifiably censoring activists on YouTube for posting videos that oppose their agenda or reveal and expose the illegal, shady things that cops do, such as this cop in this video threatening me with a false contempt of court charge if I post this to YouTube.

This is scary.

This sets the dangerous precedent that if a cop doesn’t like his image being used or broadcasted on YouTube, he can abuse YouTube’s policies to take it down, which is what LAPD did in this case.

This puts in jeopardy any activist who exposes and reports on police crimes to lose a valuable YouTube channel that can expose and make people aware of police crimes and brutality.

Please help me convince YouTube to reinstate the video so that LAPD and all other police departments will know that they can not get away with abusing YouTube’s terms of service system to violate people’s first amendment rights.

Help roll-back this knee-jerk reaction to censor police actions by YouTube.

 

EPN

Pete Eyre

Pete Eyre is co-founder of CopBlock.org. As an advocate of peaceful, consensual interactions, he seeks to inject a message of complete liberty and self-government into the conversation of police accountability. Eyre went to undergrad and grad school for law enforcement, then spent time in DC as an intern at the Cato Institute, a Koch Fellow at the Drug Policy Alliance, Directer of Campus Outreach at the Institute for Humane Studies, Crasher-in-Chief at Bureaucrash, and as a contractor for the Future of Freedom Foundation. In 2009 he left the belly of the beast and hit the road with Motorhome Diaries and later co-founded Liberty On Tour. He spent time in New Hampshire home, and was involved with Free Keene, the Free State Project and The Daily Decrypt.