YouTube has begun blocking discriminatory content a day after saying it doesn’t violate its policies
The video platform announced that it will prohibit videos that promote discrimination or segregation based on things like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation, and veteran status.
This decision is a big deal and has the potential to affect thousands of channels. However, it’s coming amid confusing and inconsistent messaging from YouTube.
Last week, Vox journalist Carlos Maza laid out the bullying he received for being gay and Latino from right-wing personality Steven Crowder in a viral Twitter thread. YouTube responded, saying Crowder’s content didn’t violate its policies.
One day later, YouTube took action against Crowder’s channel — because the company found his videos did violate its policies.
The company’s confusing response showed how the major social tech platforms’ struggle to identify and enforce what speech is permissible, and how to develop policies around it.
👉 It’s only been a day since the new policy — and one history teacher had his educational YouTube channel mistakenly banned for hosting “hate speech.” This is going great.
Beto O’Rourke wants term limits for Congress and the Supreme Court
The Texas presidential candidate released a sweeping voting rights and government reform plan that highlights tensions in the Democratic field.
O’Rourke said he would restore the ability to vote to felons who have served their sentences, but his plan would not give voting rights to people currently in prison. This is a fracture point — some Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, believe those rights should’ve never been stripped in the first place.
O’Rourke’s plan would limit members of Congress to serving 12 years and create 18-year Supreme Court terms. Term limits have also been a cause for intense debate for the Dems.
SNAPSHOTS
The Trump administration is canceling English classes, soccer, and legal aid for unaccompanied immigrant children. The Office of Refugee Resettlement told contractors it’s cutting down on activities due to budget constraints as the number of detainees continues to grow.
The EU’s embassy in Moscow was hacked and the EU kept it secret. According to a leaked document, an ongoing “sophisticated cyber espionage event” that began in February 2017 was discovered in April, just weeks before the European Parliament elections — but the EU’s foreign and security policy agency did not disclose the incident publicly. Russian entities are believed to be behind the hack.
A Texas teacher was fired after asking Trump via Twitter to “remove the illegals” from her school. Georgia Clark, an English teacher in Fort Worth, admitted writing the tweets to Trump asking for his help in “investigating and removing the illegals.” She said she thought the posts were private.
The white campground worker who pulled a gun on a black couple has been charged with a crime. Ruby Howell, 70, lost her job with Kampgrounds of America after a video of her confronting a black couple trying to have a picnic went viral. In the video, Howell displays a gun. Now, she has been charged with a misdemeanor count of threatening exhibition of a weapon.
A Dutch teenager’s death was wrongly reported as “legal euthanasia” across international media. Here’s how they got it wrong.
The story seemed to be everywhere this week. Hundreds of media outlets reported on the death of Dutch 17-year-old Noa Pothoven, claiming she was “legally euthanized” after her life had “become unbearable due to depression.”
It’s hard to overstate the reach the story had — it was shared hundreds of thousands of times. There’s a big problem with this version of the story: Pothoven was not “legally euthanized” at all.
Thanks to the diligence of Politico Europe reporter Naomi O’Leary, the truth started to emerge: Pothoven requested euthansia under Dutch law but had been refused. She died at home after refusing to eat and her parents and doctors agreed not to force feed her, offering her palliative care instead.
We get to the bottom of how the wrong story spread so far and wide.
The iconic “baby name meme” mom is winking at her haters with a new name reveal
McKinli Hatch went viral the first time after she posted a “name reveal” of her soon-to-be born baby that became a meme.
Occasionally, people wrote mean things about her baby name choices, too. If you don’t remember the internet moment, this photo might jog your memory:
Now, Hatch is back with good humor and winking at her haters. After she got a new pup, when her followers asked about the dog’s name, she decided to recreate her iconic moment:
