The following video produced by sixteen-year-old Madeleine McAulay has been banned by YouTube because it did not meet their "community guidelines." The video, which had garnered over 20,000 hits in only a week, was submitted to Breitbart News for consideration when it was first released. As editor of Breitbart TV, the video curating division of Breitbart News, I receive dozens of daily submissions from talented and thoughtful citizen journalists. Many of them are similar to McAulay's video which consists of an individual sitting in front of their webcam and giving their opinion about an issue in the news. These "vlogging" submissions very rarely get published at Breitbart TV. It is not a reflection of the content or quality of the videos; they just don't generally fit with Breitbart TV's editorial objective, which is to provide newsworthy and compelling videos catering to the center-right audience.
I was thrilled to see Ms. McAulay's video do so well and equally thrilled when Fox and Friends featured her and her video on their wildly popular morning news show. Even with that kind of coverage, the video still did not fit with the content that we generally look for when putting together the Breitbart News video page... until this weekend.
YouTube, the Internet's video town square, decided on Friday that Ms. McAulay's video should not be seen. They removed it and rejected her appeal on the grounds that it did not meet their "community guidelines." YouTube decided that the opinion expressed by Ms. McAulay was so hateful, so inflammatory, so out-of-bounds that the opinion is not suitable for their audience to hear. Ms. McAulay, in the opinion of YouTube, must be silenced.
Now this video is news.
We are proud to host this video at Breitbart News and we invite everyone to Tweet it, Facebook it and embed it in their blogs. Not because we necessarily agree with Ms. McAulay, but because we believe, as our site's founder did, that our nation is stronger because of active and engaging debate of all ideas.
More voices, not less.
Big Journalism
