93-year-old YouTuber back in business after being kicked off platform over porn allegation
CBC
A 93-year-old retired University of Toronto professor recently had her YouTube channel cancelled on the grounds that she was broadcasting pornography.
Metta Spencer, a sociologist whose online broadcasts regularly feature world leaders in the fields of peace, climate change, pandemics, famine and, ironically, cyber risks said she spent weeks trying to convince YouTube Canada that the porn clips were the result of a hacking attack, without success.
"They cut me off," she said. "I have [hundreds of] hour-long forum discussions that I have produced, and they were all on YouTube and they took them all out."
Spencer's YouTube channel, To Save the World, was reinstated on Monday after calls were made to YouTube's parent company, Google, by CBC Toronto.
"YouTube's community guidelines outline what type of content isn't allowed on YouTube, including explicit content," a Google Canada spokesperson said in an email to CBC Toronto. "Posting content that violates our community guidelines can result in channel termination. In the case of this channel, we have carefully reviewed the account appeal and have removed the video that violated our policies, and reinstated the channel."
Spencer said the web of FAQs, email addresses and websites that are recommended in the event a user wants to appeal a channel's cancellation were useless.
"I'd be ashamed to have you see me when I'm in the throes of that kind of emotional frustration," she said.
But Carmi Levy, a tech expert based in London, Ont., said Spencer's frustration trying to make contact with a helpful human is common among social media platform users who find themselves suddenly suspended or cancelled.
"Hardly a day goes by that I don't get some message in one of my inboxes, telling me a story that is very much like this. Depressingly similar," he said.
Levy said large companies like Google have no incentive to make it easy for users to get help.
"Ask anyone whose TikTok account, for example, has been shut down for violations of their terms of service even though they didn't cause them," he said. "There are no longer human monitoring teams or human digital safety teams."
Spencer's problems began on Oct. 27, as she was broadcasting a panel discussion on climate change — one in a series that she's been producing for six years.
The forum was being hosted on Zoom and broadcast live on YouTube.
"Suddenly we had a 'Zoom bombing,'" she said. "Somebody busts in and starts showing pornographic videos ... and I couldn't get rid of them. They'd taken over my computer."
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WARNING: This story details allegations of child abuse and includes graphic content.
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