TFF 🎥 YouTube/Vimeo Censorship
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Google/YouTube and Vimeo censor TFF’s channels. Our videos therefore appear in the top menu here on Substack.
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November 4, 2024
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The YouTube censorship scandal
TFF has been on YouTube and Vimeo for about 15 years. So far, we have not produced many videos ourselves; we have been happy to be 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 messages to Google/YouTube several times, asking how TFF—an organisation devoted to the UN Charter norm of making ‘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 on TFF’s earlier homepages. It is done in the most authoritarian manner. Finally,
c) TFF has already been significantly “de-ranked” on Google Search. That began to happen after our fact-finding mission to Syria in December 2016.
The Vimeo censorship scandal
In November, this message comes up when trying to access TFF’s Vimeo Channel:
We write to Vimeo’s support immediately, believing this must be a technical issue. We’re told that this is due to “local regulations.” Assuming this must mean the EU, we ask Vimeo to explain which regulations and send us a link that documents their assertion. It is indeed strange that we can log in and upload videos on Vimeo while being prevented from having a Channel - i.e. your collection of all your videos in one, nicely designed and easy-to-view page.
The answer was that “we are unable to share specific regulations influencing these changes” but that they are changes in the EU and the UK. And, in the usual authoritarian manner, our support ticket was terminated by them.
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TFF does not accept censorship in general and censorship of peace research and education 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 and must therefore be preserved.
Therefore, we aim to post selections of all TFF Associates’ videos here on Substack, so please see the top 🎥 menus as one by one is added.
Jan Oberg
TFF director