SINGAPORE, May 8 — YouTube has terminated the channel of Singaporean teen blogger Amos Yee, who has been making headlines in the West for promoting paedophilia.
The removal of his account for violation of the social media platform’s community guidelines came about two weeks after YouTube drew flak for placing an advertisement promoting child development on his channel Brain and Butter.
On Sunday, Amos — whose Facebook account was temporarily suspended for 30 days last November — said on his Facebook page that his YouTube channel “has been taken down”.
His YouTube channel had been running for about three years, and had more than 40,000 subscribers.
His Twitter account was also suspended last year, but he has since created a new account using another handle.
“My Youtube Channel and all the videos there have been completely taken down because of my views defending paedophilia,” he wrote on Facebook.
He added in a separate post: “Thank gosh I have this Facebook page with roughly the same number of followers. The only problem is most of my audience here are Singaporeans.”
Amos, 19, whose online posts mocking and criticising the Singapore Government and other races and religion twice landed him in jail, was granted asylum in the United States last September.
While in the US, Amos has continued to be drawn to controversy.
On April 20, American news network CNN published a report on YouTube running advertisements from more than 300 companies and organisations – including Netflix, Facebook, Under Armour, Adidas, Amazon, newspapers and government agencies – on extremist channels.
These channels promoted paedophilia, white nationalists, Nazis, conspiracy theories and North Korean propaganda.
For example, an advertisement by the American trade association for the toy industry ran on a playlist titled “paedophilia is life” on Amos’ channel.
The association pulled the advertisement after the CNN report.
When contacted, a YouTube spokesperson said the company does not comment on individual channels.
A web page explaining its policy on account terminations state that banned users may be prohibited from accessing, possessing or creating any other YouTube channels.
An email detailing the reason for termination would be sent to the account holder. Under its policy, accounts can be removed if a user violated its community guidelines repeatedly, was “involved in a single case of severe abuse”, or was dedicated to hate speech, harassment or impersonation, for example. — TODAY
