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Nowhere to rant as Google also suspends Trump’s YouTube account

By Hilary Kimuyu January 13th, 2021 1 min read

Embattled outgoing US President Donald Trump’s YouTube account has been suspended by Google.

YouTube, which is the world’s largest video platform, said on Tuesday night that Trump uploaded content that violated its policies, giving it an automatic one-strike, which leads to a minimum seven-day suspension from uploading new content.

At the same time,the Google-owned company said that it is also disabling the comments section.

“Given the ongoing concerns about violence, we will also be indefinitely disabling comments on President Trump’s channel, as we’ve done to other channels where there are safety concerns found in the comments section,” the company tweeted late Tuesday.

Donald J. Trump’s YouTube account had 2.77 million subscribers and it typically posts several videos a day from himself and from right-wing media stations.

“After review, and in light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence, we removed new content uploaded to Donald J. Trump’s channel for violating our policies,” the company said.

YouTube had been the only remaining major social media platform not to have suspended Trump in some fashion.

Facebook suspended Trump’s account “indefinitely”, while Twitter also banned him completely after he incited supporters to storm the Capitol building last week.

Under YouTube’s policies, earning a second strike will result in a two-week suspension and three strikes will result in a permanent ban.

On Friday, Google also removed Parler, a social media app popular with Trump supporters, from the Google Play Store, making it much harder for Android users to download and access the app.

YouTube is unique from other social networks because videos can be shared on other platforms, giving it a wide-ranging reach.