War: YouTube Goes To War With Bitcoin And Crypto
The relationship between Google and Bitcoin and cryptocurrency has been fraught for a long time, but it seems to have only taken a turn for the worse.
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advertising were previously banned by the search giant, knocking the bitcoin price, before agreeing to allow them in after a three-month pause in September last year.
Google has opted to delete hundreds of YouTube bitcoin and cryptocurrency videos in what's called a "crypto-purge"— leaving many who make videos relevant to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies unfairly targeted by the search giant.A spokesman for YouTube said that the video sharing site has since restored the purged videos, but some content creators say that their deleted videos remain inaccessible
The YouTube crypto-purge seems to hit only smaller networks and publishers, with crypto-related videos from the likes of CoinTelegraph and U.S. business news network CNBC missing the cull. One YouTuber Chris Dunn, who has some 210,000 subscribers on the website, has been asking YouTube for a Twitter explanation."YouTube just removed most of my crypto videos citing 'harmful or dangerous content' and 'sale of regulated goods,'" Dunn wrote, adding he's been making videos on the platform for 10 years and built up 200,000 subs and 7 million views.
Some in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency industry have vowed to challenge the decision.
"YouTube deleting all Crypto content is a massive blow to the industry," Ran NeuNer, host of the CryptoTrader show on CNBC Africa, said via Twitter.
industry," Ran NeuNer, host of the CryptoTrader show on CNBC Africa, said via Twitter.
"YouTube is the go to place for educational video and the first port of call for new people entering the ecosystem to learn the basics. As a community we should challenge this formally."
Meanwhile, others have been searching for a reason for the purge, finding YouTube's citing of "harmful and dangerous content" unsatisfactory.
"So far Alphabet [Google's parent company] has made no attempt to explain the reasons for the culling," Mati Greenspan, the founder of research group Quantum Economics, wrote in a note.
"The first instinct that many had was that perhaps they're trying to protect the consumer from scams. However, this wouldn't make much sense given that Google and Facebook have already had a crypto advertising ban last year that has long since been reversed, likely due to regulatory clarity in the U.S. where it was found that bitcoin and ethereum are neither securities nor scams."
A YouTube spokesperson told CoinDesk that YouTube made "the wrong call."
"With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it's brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it. We also offer uploaders the ability to appeal removals and we will re-review the content," the spokesperson said. The spokesperson further stated that YouTube has not changed any policies related to cryptocurrency videos.