YouTube Terminates PINAC Account for “Violent” Police Videos, the Latest Shutdown on Independent Media

By Andrew Meyer | PINAC | November 20, 2015

On October 27, YouTube terminated the main channel of Photography is Not a Crime, claiming the channel posts too many videos that are “violent or graphic content that appears to be posted in a shocking, sensational, or disrespectful manner.”

Because of that, PINAC lost hundreds of videos it had posted on the channel.

The videos found on the PINAC YouTube channel are typically also aired by national and local television news stations now that police violence has become national news.

However, PINAC’s account was suspended in August for airing footage of the Virginia reporters getting shot to death, which many news stations chose not to run.

“We did so because we wanted to give readers the choice to view the full video if they wanted rather than make the decision for them,” said PINAC Founder and Publisher Carlos Miller. “While many news stations chose not to run that video, Washington Post media analyst Erik Wemple was quoted in an interview that not running the video in its entirety is ‘coddling’ the readership – which was our viewpoint all along.”

Wemple stated the following in that interview:

“If you really want to understand enormity and the horror of what happened, I’m afraid airing the video is one way to get that across,” he says.

“I don’t see the point in not telling the full story,” Wemple adds.

News outlets are not showing the images and posting the videos because, as the The New York Times put it, “we didn’t want to force people to see it,” he says.

“I think that’s coddling the audience a little much,” Wemple says.

YouTube then suspended the account again in September after PINAC aired a video of Delaware police shooting and killing a man in a wheelchair.

And the last straw was in October over a video of a Canadian cop repeatedly running over a dog before stepping out of his patrol car and shooting it to death.

That was when we received the following email.

YouTube continues to host thousands of channels that could also be described as “violent” content providers, including channels specializing in professional fighting highlights, clips of people fighting in the street and other channels with nearly identical content to PINAC.

Mark Dice, who has posted videos exposing the Bilderberg Group and other topics blacklisted from corporate “mainstream” media also had his channel deleted in March of 2014. When Dice made a video drawing attention to this blatant censorship on his secondary channel, that channel was then also deleted without explanation, despite zero negative history against it.

YouTube has a long history of shutting down alternative media channels, including those of Russia Today, Federal Jack, Stefan Molyneaux, and Alex Jones. And YouTube is not alone in their censorship of alternative media.

Luke Rudkowski, who runs the emerging news outlet WeAreChange, had his Facebook account suspended, while an Infowars reporter was repeatedly banned from Twitter.

PINAC Executive Director Grant Stern made the following statement:

It’s upsetting that YouTube would destroy a year’s worth of news journalism, including numerous worldwide exclusive videos. Our numerous YouTube Live interviews with key sources from the Baltimore Uprising were due to be arranged into a feature length movie, but now it appears all of that hard work was for naught.

The summary deletion of our YouTube account harms the public interest in knowing how our government officials behave when caught on camera, and breaks countless hundreds of news stories around the country who linked to our videos.

We have appealed each suspension only to be quickly denied. We appealed the last decision but don’t expect YouTube to restore our channel judging by their denials on previous appeals.

However, others have had the suspensions of their accounts typically overturned, but it often requires a fight from the audience. To help restore PINAC’s YouTube channel, post on your Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube itself using # YouTubeCensorship and #PhotographyIsNotACrime.

But we’re not holding our breath, so we are now using this channel as our main YouTube channel.