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In February 2024<\/span>, without warning, YouTube deleted the account of independent British journalist Robert Inlakesh.<\/p>\n His YouTube page featured dozens of videos, including numerous livestreams documenting Israel\u2019s military occupation of the West Bank. In a decade covering Palestine and Israel, he had captured video of Israeli authorities demolishing Palestinian homes, police harassing Palestinian drivers, and Israeli soldiers shooting at Palestinian civilians and journalists during protests in front of illegal Israeli settlements. In an instant, all of that footage was gone.<\/p>\n In July, YouTube deleted Inlakesh\u2019s private backup account. And in August, Google<\/a>, YouTube\u2019s parent company, deleted his Google account, including his Gmail and his archive of documents and writings.<\/p>\n The tech giant initially claimed Inlakesh\u2019s account violated YouTube\u2019s community guidelines. Months later, the company justified his account termination by alleging his page contained spam or scam content.<\/p>\n However, when The Intercept inquired further about Inlakesh\u2019s case, nearly two years after his account was deleted, YouTube provided a separate and wholly different explanation for the termination: a connection to an Iranian influence campaign.<\/p>\n YouTube declined to provide evidence to support this claim, stating that the company doesn\u2019t discuss how it detects influence operations. Inlakesh remains unable to make new Google accounts, preventing him from sharing his video journalism on the largest English language video platform.<\/p>\n Inlakesh, now a freelance journalist, acknowledged that from 2019 to 2021 he worked from the London office of the Iranian state-owned media organization Press TV, which is under U.S. sanctions. Even so, Inlakesh said that should not have led to the erasure of his entire YouTube account, the vast majority of which was his own independent content that was posted before or after his time at Press TV.<\/p>\n A public Google document from the month Inlakesh\u2019s account was deleted notes that the company had recently closed more than 30 accounts it alleged were linked to Iran that had posted content critical of Israel and its war on Gaza. The company did not respond when asked specifically if Inlakesh\u2019s account was among those mentioned in the document.<\/p>\n Inlakesh said he felt like he was targeted not due to his former employer but because of his journalism about Palestine, especially amid the increasingly common trend of pro-Israeli censorship among Big Tech companies.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat are the implications of this, not just for me, but for other journalists?\u201d Inlakesh told The Intercept. \u201cTo do this and not to provide me with any information \u2014 you\u2019re basically saying I\u2019m a foreign agent of Iran for working with an outlet; that\u2019s the implication. You have to provide some evidence for that. Where\u2019s your documentation?\u201d<\/p>\n Over the past couple years, YouTube and Google\u2019s explanations given for the terminations of Inlakesh\u2019s accounts have been inconsistent and vague.<\/p>\n YouTube first accused Inlakesh of \u201csevere or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines.\u201d When a Google employee, Marc Cohen, noticed Inlakesh\u2019s public outcry<\/a> about his account termination in February 2024, he decided to get involved. Cohen filed a support ticket on Google\u2019s internal issue tracker system, \u201cthe Buganizer,\u201d asking why a journalist\u2019s account was deleted. Failing to get an answer internally, Cohen went public<\/a> with his questions that March. After drawing the attention of the YouTube team on Twitter, he said he eventually received an internal response from Google which claimed that Inlakesh\u2019s account had been terminated owing to \u201cscam, deceptive or spam content.\u201d<\/p>\n Cohen, who resigned<\/a> from Google later that year over its support<\/a> of the Israeli government\u2019s genocide in Gaza, said had he not gotten involved, Inlakesh would have been left with even less information.<\/p>\n \u201cThey get away with that because they\u2019re Google,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cWhat are you going to do? Go hire a lawyer and sue Google? You have no choice.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n When Inlakesh\u2019s Gmail account was deleted this year, Google said his account had been \u201cused to impersonate someone or misrepresent yourself,\u201d which Google said is a violation of its policies. Inlakesh appealed three times but was given no response.<\/p>\n Only after The Intercept\u2019s inquiry into Inlakesh\u2019s case did Google shift its response to alleged Iranian influence.<\/p>\n \u201cThis creator\u2019s channel was terminated in February 2024 as part of our ongoing investigations into coordinated influence operations backed by the Iranian state,\u201d a YouTube spokesperson told The Intercept. The termination of his channel meant all other accounts associated with Inlakesh, including his backup account, were also deleted, YouTube said. <\/p>\n When The Intercept asked YouTube to elaborate on the reason behind the account deletions, such as which specific content may have flagged the account as being linked to an Iranian state influence operation, a YouTube spokesperson replied that YouTube doesn\u2019t \u201cdisclose specifics of how we detect coordinated influence operations,\u201d and instead referred The Intercept to Google\u2019s Threat Analysis Group\u2019s quarterly bulletins<\/a>. TAG is a team within Google that describes itself as working \u201cto counter government-backed hacking and attacks against Google and our users.\u201d<\/p>\n Google\u2019s Threat Analysis Group\u2019s bulletin<\/a> from when Inlakesh\u2019s account was first terminated states that in February 2024, a total of 37 YouTube channels were deleted as a result of an \u201cinvestigation into coordinated influence operations linked to Iran.\u201d Four of these accounts, the document notes, were sharing content which \u201cwas critical of the Israeli government and its actions in the ongoing Israel-Gaza war\u201d and had \u201cshared content depicting alleged cyber attacks targeting Israeli organizations.\u201d Google said in the document that the other 33 terminated YouTube channels had shown content \u201csupportive of Iran, Yemen, and Palestine and critical of the US and Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n Google has a long-standing and well-documented<\/a> practice of censoring <\/a>Palestinian content or content critical of the Israeli government, in addition to evidence of human rights abuses in other conflicts<\/a>. Such censorship<\/a> has only exacerbated<\/a> during Israel\u2019s genocidal war on Gaza,<\/p>\n The company deploys various methods to censor content, such as teams of experts who manually review content, automated systems that flag content, reviews of U.S. sanction and foreign terror organization lists, as well as takedown requests from governments.<\/p>\n For the past decade<\/a>, Israel\u2019s Cyber Unit has openly run operations<\/a> to convince companies to delete Palestine-related content from platforms such as YouTube.<\/p>\n Among U.S. allies, Israel had the highest percentage of requests resulting in takedowns on Google platforms, with a nearly 90 percent takedown rate, according to Google\u2019s data<\/a> since 2011. This rate outpaces countries like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Google\u2019s home country, the United States. Absent from Google\u2019s public reports, however, are takedown requests made by individual users, a route often weaponized by the Israeli cyber unit and internally<\/a> by pro-Israel employees<\/a>.<\/p>\n The scale of content deleted specifically due to U.S. sanctions is also difficult to quantify since such decisions happen without transparency. A recent investigation<\/a> by The Intercept revealed that YouTube quietly deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights organizations due to the Trump administration\u2019s sanctions against the groups<\/a> for assisting the International Criminal Court\u2019s war crimes case against Israeli officials. The terminated pages accounted for at least 700 videos erased, many of which spotlighted alleged human rights abuses by the Israeli government.<\/p>\n Dia Kayyali, a technology and human rights consultant, said that in the past several years, as Big Tech platforms<\/a> have relied more on automated systems that are fed U.S. sanction and terror lists, rights groups have seen an increase in the number of journalists within the Middle East and North Africa region who have had their content related to Palestine removed from YouTube, even when the content they post does not violate the company\u2019s policies. The same could have happened with Inlakesh\u2019s account, Kayyali said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd that\u2019s part of the problem with automation \u2014 because it just does a really bad job of parsing content \u2014 content that could be graphic, anything that has any reference to Hamas,\u201d Kayyali said. Hamas is included within the U.S. foreign terror organization list and Iran remains one of the most sanctioned countries by the U.S. government.<\/p>\n Google and other Big Tech platforms rely heavily on U.S. sanction lists in part to avoid potential liability from the State Department. But such caution is not always warranted, said Mohsen Farshneshani, principal attorney at the Washington, D.C.-based Sanctions Law Center.<\/p>\n Multinational corporations like Google tend to lean toward \u201covercompliance\u201d with sanction regulations, often deleting content even when it legally is not required to do so, harming journalists and human rights groups, said Farshneshani.<\/p>\n Under U.S. law, in the Berman Amendment<\/a> to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, informational materials \u2014 in this case, reporting and journalism \u2014 are exempt from being subject to sanctions.<\/p>\n \u201cDeleting an entire account is far from what the statutes or the regulations ask of U.S. entities.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Such a carveout should have protected Inlakesh\u2019s page from being deleted, Farshneshani said. Google likely could have taken down specific videos that raised concern, or demonetized specific videos or the entire account, he said. (Inlakesh said that years before terminating his videos and account, YouTube had demonetized some of his content depicting Israeli military violence.)<\/p>\n \u201cDeleting an entire account is far from what the statutes or the regulations ask of U.S. entities,\u201d Farshneshani said. \u201cThe exemption is meant for situations like this. And if these companies are to uphold their part of the bargain as brokers of information for the greater global community, they would do the extra leg work to make sure the stuff stays up.\u201d<\/p>\n While YouTube and Google have not stated whether Inlakesh\u2019s history with Press TV played a factor in the deletion, the Iranian state-funded outlet has long been under Google\u2019s scrutiny. In 2013, Google temporarily deleted Press TV\u2019s YouTube account before permanently deleting<\/a> the channel in 2019 along with its Gmail account amid the first Trump administration\u2019s sanctions campaign against Iran. The Biden administration in 2021 seized and censored dozens of websites<\/a> tied to Iran, and in 2023 placed sanctions on Press TV<\/a> due to Iran\u2019s violent crackdown on anti-government protesters <\/a>after the in-custody death of Mahsa Amini<\/a>.<\/p>\n Press TV also has been accused by rights groups and journalists<\/a> for filming and airing propaganda videos<\/a> in which individuals detained by Iran are coerced to \u201cconfess<\/a>\u201d to alleged crimes in recorded interviews, as a part of the government\u2019s attempts to justify their imprisonment or execution.<\/p>\n Press TV did not respond to The Intercept\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nMisdirection and Lack of Answers<\/h2>\n
A Pattern of Censorship<\/h2>\n
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