Today we logged in to our YouTube account only to be greeted by the warning screen above. Our 2010 interview with adult film legend Nina Hartley had apparently been flagged for violating YouTube’s community guidelines. Upon review, someone at YouTube removed the video and issued us a warning that our account could be suspended or even terminated if we continued to violate this vague policy.
We’ve watched and re-watched our brief interview with Ms. Hartley and we don’t see how it violates the rules against “nudity, pornography or sexually provocative content.” We think it should be covered under YouTube’s exception for “documentary” content, since Ms. Hartley is discussing the popularity of “MILF porn” in a historical and sociological context, not describing sex acts or promoting any specific porn movie.
Readers of our blog may be aware of our past troubles with censorship, particularly on Facebook where a workshop on cunnilingus was flagged for removal and where the words “bondage” and “anal” have been blocked in event titles. In October of 2010, we also learned that our company’s name was part of a distinguished group of words, phrases and names placed on the Google Instant blacklist, a mysterious list which, among other head-scratchers, continues to block suggestions for “bisexual.”
We know that Google owns YouTube and we appreciate they they want to prevent the popular video sharing site from becoming a porn free-for-all. But we must sincerely ask if our Nina Hartley video is really a violation of YouTube’s Community Guidelines. Judge for yourself. We’ve posted the banned clip on Vimeo. You can watch it above.
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That’s insane. I’ve seen things much worse than this ok YouTube!!