Response From YouTube Received Regarding Breastfeeding Video Banning: Video Reinstated!

Hi there,

Thank you for your email.  We have reviewed the video and have found that it was removed in error and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.  The video has now been reinstated and your account has not been penalized.

Sincerely,

Mike
The YouTube Team

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Thank you for all your efforts -- posting video responses, writing posts, and sharing your thoughts about this. We are so pleased that YouTube took another look at our video and reinstated it.

Justice is ours! 

Our missions still need your attention, however. We're back to fighting the toy recalls and BPA leaching into our baby bottles and formula. If you've got questions for the folks at the Toy Industry Association (TIA), check out Mom-101's post. She's got their ears, and we want to get answers. Leave a comment!

Also, make sure to check out the transcript from my conference call with Sonya Lunger regarding the BPA leaching from formula containers. We need your help in badgering formula companies to change how they make and package their formula! More information on her study and what we should be purchasing to feed our babies here.

Comments

[Mom101]

Whoo for justice! You go, crusading mamas.

[wordwise]

The reason these videos were banned in the first place was to get child porn off these social networking sites. In order to do that quickly, some of these companies had to make broad, sweeping moves to eliminate child torture and rape from infiltrating their sites. The unfortunate by-product was that some innocent advocacy sites were also eliminated or censored.

It was never a calculated effort on anybody's part to censor breastfeeding.

Unfortunately, while child pornography is being investigated, some breastfeeding advocacy had to take one for the team. Protecting our children in a broad, housecleaning effort and going back to re-instate wrongly censored videos was the right thing to do. If these video sharing or social networking sites had to go through each video with pain-staking time and effort, while allowing child porn to remain on those sites for longer than they had to, while these time taking practise and impossible policing of every single video, that would have caused one child expoitation viedo to remain up one day longer, then I support the way this has all played out.

Ultimately, if you've done nothing wrong, as in the case of this breastfeeding montage, justice will prevail. :)

[Lactivista]

Actually, wordwise, YouTube uses the community to police itself -- so if someone flagged it, the YouTube "official" should have noted that it was fine and not banned it.

[crunchy domestic goddess]

glad to see an apology from youtube and that the video is back up.

[wordwise]

Youtube does not solely rely on policing itself. They have auto-piloted paramters. Perverted Justice and other child advocates work with youtube and social networking sites in general sweeps of child pornography. Their parameters are wide, but I'd rather have that and then have vidoes/pages reinstated than have one child porn vidoe/page stay up one day longer than it should.

[Adele]

"Scuse me...but I fail to understand what breastfeeding has to do with child porn. I'm struggling to think of how the two might be mistaken for each other.

[wordwise]

Adele, it doesn't have anything to do with porn. These sites program automatic parameters with key word searches and content searches that if meeting a certain criteria, are taken down automatically. Nobody has the manpower to do this manually.

Unfortunatley, some survivor stories have also been taken down (as in, victims of sexual abuse), by mistake.

This is not part of a conspiracy to thwart breastfeeding or persecute breastfeeding mothers. Sorry. It's not.

[jaelithe]

Wordwise, you are talking as though you know for a fact that that a child porn crackdown is the reason YouTube removed the video. How do you know that for a fact? Do you work for YouTube? The letter from YouTube did not state that was the reason.

The video has been getting a lot of violently negative feedback in the YouTube comments section from people who are apparently extremely opposed to public baby feeding. It only makes sense that some of the people complaining so vituperously about this video must have also flagged it as obscene.

I just went and checked the tags that were submitted with the video, and I don't see ANYTHING in those tags that ought to have triggered an automatic removal. The only word there that I think perhaps would justify an investigation (NOT removal) of the video is "breast." If child porn vigilantes are using the "breastfeeding" tag as a red flag, they are out of line.

Of course as a mother I want children protected. But "this must have been taken down because it accidentally set off an automated child porn alarm" seems like far too convenient an excuse. I imagine that what actually happened is that a lot of users flagged it, and then an ill-informed YouTube employee made a judgment call that was not in line Google's corporate culture. (At least, I hope it wasn't in line with Google's corporate culture, being it would be a shame to have to move my email and blogging accounts from Google. Wouldn't that be a shame, Google?)

[Paula]

Congrats! way to go.

[wordwise]

I didn't see any negative comments, perhaps those were taken down?

If the tags included "mothers", "breasts", "babies", "children" or the something like that, then I wouldn't be suprised if it was flagged by unintended parameters. Plus the opening uses the words "obscene", which was intended to be sarcastic (obviosly), but could have set off some flags. I dont' know this for a fact, but since child advocate groups have been working with these sites in scrubbing them with very broad parameters, it wouldn't suprise me at all.

There are several notorious internet pedophiles that are obsessed with breastfeeding. While it's not pleasant to think about, it's an unfortunate by-product of the net iself.