YouTube to Ban Firearms Videos Beginning in April - Granite Grok

YouTube to Ban Firearms Videos Beginning in April

youtube-logo-full_colorBeginning in April YouTube will no longer allow videos that promote websites that sell firearms or accessories or that offer instruction on care or use of firearms.

“We routinely make updates and adjustments to our enforcement guidelines across all of our policies,” a YouTubespokeswoman said in a statement to Bloomberg. “While we’ve long prohibited the sale of firearms, we recently notified creators of updates we will be making around content promoting the sale or manufacture of firearms and their accessories.”

InRange TV is moving to PornHub. Good for them, I guess, but I don’t envision an exodus to PornHub for firearms channels or vlogging devotees to that subject.

I do see an opportunity for other online streaming platforms to absorb (and profit) from YouTube’s decision. A move that could include a wide range of other vloggers and interests who will see this as the last straw in the war with online private media companies obsessed with limiting speech to which they object.

And to be clear, I don’t have a problem with that. YouTube can do what it wants with its platform. The government isn’t exercising a use of force against them to promote this policy change. So I say do with your stuff what you like and let the market work it out.

As to the latter, I’ve never ventured too far from YouTube because I’m lazy about that. It is easy to use, familiar, and ubiquitous. But then so were a lot of things of which no one living today has ever heard.

Decisions have consequences. Google has to do what it feels compelled to do, and that will undoubtedly translate to other issues and content. Content providers and their audience will find each other someplace else, a reality that very much explains GraniteGrok’s success and continued growth.

No one else is in New Hampshire media does what we do here, the way we do it, no registrations, no paywalls, no subscriptions. And it’s easy to share.

The next YouTube will be like that, and while YouTube has Google’s billions to back it up, that may not always be the case, and History has plenty to say about that.

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