The Atheist Blogger

Much as I love James Randi and the JREF, I have to disagree with him in this video, where he says YouTube didn’t act unfairly over the JREF channel suspension.

It is unbelievably unfair to punish an entire channel for the contents of one video (or two videos, or three, or…you get the picture). It makes it even more unfair when the other videos on that channel are educational, and taking down such videos for a week means that people cannot use them for educational purposes. Videos should be suspended, so should the channel’s rights to upload a video, but suspending an entire channel is going completely over the top. P.Z. Myers summed it up nicely:

Responding to a violation by automatically yanking the whole account is not appropriate and civilized behavior, especially when it can be resolved by an amicable communication. How about communicating first, and then yanking if someone is intransigent? The problem is that not everyone has the resources or the clout of the JREF, and there have been far too many cases of individuals getting shut down on entirely bogus complaints.