TFF 🎥 YouTube & After

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A story of Google/YouTube censorship & how TFF will get around it

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November 4, 2024

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TFF has been on YouTube and Vimeo for about 15 years. So far, we have not produced many videos ourselves; we have been happy being interviewed by professional video creators and living on their platforms and just making playlists of them on our channel.

However, in September 2024, Google-owned YouTube cancelled Jan Oberg, who administered TFF’s YouTube Channel. When trying to log in as an administrator, these messages appear:

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We’ve sent emails to Google/YouTube a number of times, asking how TFF—an organisation devoted to peace by peaceful means—has violated the mentioned Community Guidelines. No answer. The first message above indicates that the decision to delete Jan Oberg has been reviewed and maintained.

That said, the enigma is that the TFF Channel is still there (!) and can be accessed by anyone. What we can not do is upload videos, save third-party videos, put them on playlists, or otherwise edit the channel.

This means that TFF’s YouTube Channel is now an archive.

Given that this is undoubtedly an attempt at censorship, we’re just hoping that our channel will live on, presumably because of a Google/YouTube mistake. We use the word “undoubtedly” because:

a) YouTube has already prevented us from posting videos created by, say, RT (Russia Today), Iranian PressTV and several others who have interviewed TFF Associates;

b) these “downed” videos that were on YouTube earlier have also been deleted, leaving big black areas also on TFF’s earlier homepages. It is done in the most authoritarian manner. Finally,

c) TFF has already been de-ranked on Google Search which began to happen after our factfinding mission to Syria in December 2016.

We do not accept censorship in general and censorship of peace-related materials in particular. We believe that what our Associates have stated concerning various subjects over decades has general historical value and research-historical and peace-historical significance.

Therefore, we aim to post selections of all TFF Associates’ videos here on Substack, so please see the top 🎥 menus.

Jan Oberg
TFF director