In case you haven’t heard of us, PragerU is a conservative educational non-profit that reaches millions of young people on the internet every day. PragerU was founded by nationally-syndicated radio host and bestselling author Dennis Prager. I’m writing to you because PragerU recently filed a lawsuit against video giant YouTube for its systematic censorship of our videos.
YouTube has chosen repeatedly to restrict and/or demonetize 50 PragerU videos for violating their “Community Guidelines.” Those guidelines are meant to protect users against viewing sexual content, violent or graphic content, and hate speech.
If you’ve seen any PragerU videos, you know as well as I do that they contain nothing even remotely close to any of these categories.
YouTube has restricted videos on topics ranging from religion to the history of the Korean War to free speech on college campuses. Some of the restricted titles include:
Why Did America Fight the Korean War? Presented by scholar Victor Davis Hanson
Israel’s Legal Founding, presented by scholar and author Alan Dershowitz
Is Islam a Religion of Peace, presented by author Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Why America Must Lead, presented by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark’s former Prime Minister
Why America Invaded Iraq presented by noted historian, Andrew Roberts
Not exactly “sexual content, violent or graphic content, and hate speech.”
More than a year ago, when we discovered what YouTube was up to, we filed a complaint with them, hoping that this was some kind of innocent mistake.
That’s when we were told by YouTube that after reviewing our videos they determined that our videos were indeed “not appropriate for a younger audience.” Of course, we have this in writing.
Think about the millions of actually inappropriate videos on YouTube and then ask yourself, “Why are PragerU’s educational videos restricted?”
The answer is rather obvious, isn’t it? YouTube has restricted PragerU videos for only one reason: Ideological discrimination.
