Gun Rights Activist Gets Temporarily Demonetized by YouTube
Jose Nino
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Concerns about Big Tech Censorship remain Despite the Remonetization of Antonia Okafor’s Channel
Despite initial reports of having her entire YouTube channel demonetized, gun rights activist Antonia Okafor was able to restore advertising on her channel after considerable backlash against YouTube was generated on Twitter.
The CEO of EmPOWERed, a gun rights organization that teaches the proper exercise of gun rights to college-age women in America, Okafor saw her entire YouTube channel demonetized on April 24th.
YouTube went straight to just demonetizing my ENTIRE channel today.
Just uploaded an episode where @NinaPrevot a Creole libertarian and I interviewed @TheAmyRobbins about teaching young women to defend themselves. pic.twitter.com/XaMOb81STS
— Antonia Okafor Cover (@antonia_okafor) April 24, 2019
This came in response to a recent upload of a video where Okafor and Nina Prevot, a libertarian activist, interviewed Amy Robbins about teaching women self-defense.
Some of Twitter’s leading conservative personalities instantly came to Okafor’s defense.
Lila Rose, the president of the pro-life group Live Action, claimed that YouTube’s action was “Blatant viewpoint suppression.”
This is nuts. @antonia_okafor has just been totally demonitized by @YouTube. Blatant viewpoint suppression. https://t.co/4w4mlgCqlW
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) April 24, 2019
Prager U, who sued YouTube in 2017 over the channel’s coordinated efforts to suppress its content, also chimed in, asking “Why is supporting the second amendment controversial?”
Political commentator Dave Rubin opined, “Does YouTube have a problem with black conservative women? Appears so.”
Does YouTube have a problem with black conservative women? Appears so… https://t.co/ADhMnVA5xw
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) April 24, 2019
In light of all this pushback, YouTube immediately re-instated Okafor’s channel to the YouTube Partner Program, citing that it was “incorrectly removed”.
A YouTube spokesperson told Breitbart News, “We enforce our YouTube Partner Program policies vigorously, consistently and without any political bias. In the case of this channel, it was incorrectly removed from the Program. With the massive volume of videos on our platform, sometimes we make the wrong call on content. The channel has been reinstated in the YouTube Partner Program.”
In the same Breitbart report, YouTube had also been exposed for adjusting search results “on behalf of progressive anti-gun activist David Hogg and Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters.”
Although Okafor did escape potential long-term harm, this is another sign of Big Tech’s war against conservatives.
Since the Parkland shooting, anti-gun activists have used conventional legislative means to push control. However, they face obvious road blocks at the federal level with Donald Trump as President and a Republican-controlled Senate.
Now, they’ve turned to the corporate boardroom.
BLP has reported on corporate bigwigs throwing their support behind anti-gun legislation like universal gun registration, as well as companies like Dick’s Sporting Goods implementing anti-gun policies as a means of virtue-signaling their support for anti-gun causes.
This recent incident involving Okafor’s YouTube channel may be a trial run of what is to come for gun rights activists as the 2020 elections approach.
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