The Atheist Blogger

YouTube seems to be becoming as controversial as its parent company Google, but whilst Google has been criticized for its terrible privacy policies, YouTube has turned to the censorship side of things. Gone were the days when you could criticize and say what you wanted (within reason) on YouTube. Now anyone with an army of followers can get accounts suspended for no good reason. Adopting a policy of “guilty until proven innocent”, YouTube takes complaints seriously, a little too seriously if you ask YouTube atheists like Thunderf00t and gogreen18, who have both been suspended for no good reason.

The latest people to get suspended are the Rational Response Squad’s channel, which was controversial and caused a minor uproar a few years back when they released the “Blasphemy Challenge”. YouTube didn’t ban them back then, so it appears very odd that they were banned today. Granted, I don’t know what their latest videos have been about, but YouTube have also banned the James Randi Educational Foundation. I’ve bolded the word that makes this ban seem almost laughable. The JREF is an organization that promotes education about the paranormal, the pseudo-scientific, and the supernatural. It debunks the claims of dangerous people like psychics, and reveals the truth about homeopathic treatments.

For the JREF to be suspended is censorship, pure and simple. Randi’s latest videos about religion seem to have hit the fundamentalist nerve, which sent them out in droves. The policy of “guilty until proven innocent” is just ludicrous, and both the JREF and Rational Response channels should be reinstated with an apology. I’m on the verge of giving up on YouTube altogether; I can’t support a site in which freedom of speech can be turned off by a single complaint.

Here is a video (ironically hosted on YouTube -- we’ll see how long that lasts) explaining things and how to complain directly to YouTube: