Source: ET Bureau
Traders, startup founders and enthusiasts questioned Google’s stance on micro-blogging platform Twitter, calling for a boycott of both YouTube and Play Store as the chorus for migrating content and applications to decentralised video hosting platforms and browsers grew louder.
US-based technology behemoth Google has faced backlash from the cryptocurrency trading community for removing — and later reinstating — hundreds of cryptocurrency videos from its video-sharing platform YouTube in the last three days, and for suspending a cryptocurrency wallet application from its Android marketplace, Google Play, last week.
Traders, startup founders and enthusiasts questioned Google’s stance on micro-blogging platform Twitter, calling for a boycott of both YouTube and Play Store as the chorus for migrating content and applications to decentralised video hosting platforms and browsers grew louder.
“These platforms are destroying a lot of value for people. Time to look at alternatives,” said Changpeng Zhao, the founder and CEO of popular cryptocurrency exchange Binance.
Mati Greenspan, the founder of Tel Aviv-based research group Quantum Economics, said, “I think that we’ve all learned some valuable lessons from this ordeal. I’ll personally be using YT (YouTube) and all Big Tech a lot more cautiously from now on.”
Earlier, YouTube said it had mistakenly removed videos from many cryptocurrency channels on the platform across the world, including India. In response to a query by ET, a YouTube spokesperson said there was no change in its content policy on cryptocurrencies and that the platform had made a “wrong call”.
“With the massive volumes of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it’s brought to our attention that a video has been removed by mistake, we act quickly to reinstate it. We also offer uploaders the ability to appeal removals and we will re-review the content,” it said.
The Google-owned video platform also said it had reinstated all affected videos. Crypto India, an Indian channel with over 40,000 subscribers, said 20 of its affected videos were back up again on YouTube.
YouTube had removed content from channels like Crypto India and Tamil Crypto earlier, saying they were displaying ‘harmful or dangerous content’ and content on ‘sale of regulated goods’. A few creators, however, said their videos were still not back, with some also pointing out that new videos, too, had been removed.
They are waiting for responses from the platform, they added.
