A 93-year-old retired University of Toronto professor recently had her YouTube channel cancelled on the grounds that she was broadcasting pornography.
Metta Spencer, a sociologist whose online broadcasts regularly feature world leaders in the fields of peace, climate change, pandemics, famine and, ironically, cyber risks said she spent weeks trying to convince YouTube Canada that the porn clips were the result of a hacking attack, without success.
“They cut me off,” she said. “I have [hundreds of] hour-long forum discussions that I have produced, and they were all on YouTube and they took them all out.”
Spencer’s YouTube channel, To Save the World, was reinstated on Monday after calls were made to YouTube’s parent company, Google, by CBC Toronto.
“YouTube’s community guidelines outline what type of content isn’t allowed on YouTube, including explicit content,” a Google Canada spokesperson said in an email to CBC Toronto. “Posting content that violates our community guidelines can result in channel termination. In the case of this channel, we have carefully reviewed the account appeal and have removed the video that violated our policies, and reinstated the channel.”
Spencer said the web of FAQs, email addresses and websites that are recommended in the event a user wants to appeal a channel’s cancellation were useless.
“I’d be ashamed to have you see me when I’m in the throes of that kind of emotional frustration,” she said.
But Carmi Levy, a tech expert based in London, Ont., said Spencer’s frustration trying to make contact with a helpful human is common among social media platform users who find themselves suddenly suspended or cancelled.
“Hardly a day goes by that I don’t get some message in one of my inboxes, telling me a story that is very much like this. Depressingly similar,” he said.
Levy said large companies like Google have no incentive to make it easy for users to get help.
“Ask anyone whose TikTok account, for example, has been shut down for violations of their terms of service even though they didn’t cause them,” he said. “There are no longer human monitoring teams or human digital safety teams.”
Live panel discussion was hacked
Spencer’s problems began on Oct. 27, as she was broadcasting a panel discussion on climate change — one in a series that she’s been producing for six years.
The forum was being hosted on Zoom and broadcast live on YouTube.
“Suddenly we had a ‘Zoom bombing,'” she said. “Somebody busts in and starts showing pornographic videos … and I couldn’t get rid of them. They’d taken over my computer.”
A series of ‘Zoom-bombings’ have hijacked calls on the video conferencing app with porn and profanity, as more use it to connect with friends, family, work and school.
Spencer eventually managed to eject the troublemaker and carry on with the meeting, she said, but later that day, when she tried to upload the video of the forum to her To Save the World channel, she found she was unable to do so.
A notice simply said, “This page isn’t available.”
Even worse, she said, videos of more than 600 previous forums and interviews that she’d uploaded to the channel were no longer accessible.
An email from YouTube informed her that she’d violated community standards during her live YouTube broadcast earlier that day and that the channel had been deactivated.
When she tried appealing via email, “YouTube never answered me,” she said.
Forums with prominent figures couldn’t be accessed
Levy said that’s a common experience.
“It’s customer service hell, and it’s created by design because these organizations, these platforms, are not required to do anything more about it,” he said. “It’s simply business as usual for them.”
Spencer said her taped forums are stored on her hard drive, but she lamented the fact that for weeks, they couldn’t be accessed by the public on her YouTube channel.
The former professor of political sociology said that in recent years, she’s hosted global leaders from the former Soviet Union about disarmament, as well as prominent Canadian parliamentarians and diplomats — among them former foreign affairs minister, Lloyd Axworthy, United Nations Ambassador Bob Rae and Alex Neve, Amnesty International Canada’s former secretary general.
Subscriber David Price, a retired research scientist, said the loss of those forums would be a blow to the public.
“They’d lose the opportunity to get first-hand knowledge being spread about climate change, as presented by a panel of experts,” he said from his home near Salmon Arm, B.C. “You get that first-hand exposure to the experts; you get a sense of where there’s consensus and where there isn’t.”
Spencer told CBC Toronto she’s “very, very relieved” that her channel has been restored. “For me, it would have been many years of my life missing.”
She said she appreciates the absurd humour in a 93-year-old academic being accused of peddling porn. But even so, “It’s not fun. It’s serious,” she said.
