YouTube is placing more restrictions on firearms-related videos, focusing on guns with new, upcoming policy changes. According to a Bloomberg reportYouTube decided to ban videos that “promote or link to websites selling weapons and accessories,” including assault products, starting this April. new policy will also ban instructional videos that explain how to build weapons.
These restrictions come a month after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida and just days before the March for Our Lives rally organized by student survivors of the Parkland shooting. YouTube took a similar step after the Las Vegas shooting last year by banning gun-change tutorials.
“We regularly make updates and corrections to our enforcement policies across all of our policies,” a YouTube representative said in a statement to Bloomberg. “While we have banned the sale of firearms for a long time, we recently announced to the producers of the updates that we will do around the content that promotes the sale or production of weapons and their accessories.”
While the policy won’t go into full effect until April, a few gun channels say it’s already in effect. Spike’s Tactical Weapons Company wrote in the article Instagram post that he has been banned from YouTube for “repeated or severe violations” of YouTube’s Community Guidelines.
The dedicated gun channel InRange TV expressed its disappointment with the new YouTube program “very poor content and open end”. According to InRange TV’s Facebook postHe recently deleted his AdSense account and has now decided to post content to PornHub in addition to YouTube, Full30, Facebook, and BitChute.
While some may see YouTube’s new firearms policy as silly talk, it’s the upcoming implementation that will get the most reaction from firearms channels. Many YouTubers have seen their content cleaned or removed because of the way YouTube’s algorithm and moderators remove offensive content and content that violates the Community Guidelines. It’s likely that gun-related videos that don’t openly violate the new rules will be caught in the first rounds of YouTube’s upcoming purge.
YouTube has placed a number of new restrictions on its content last year, since the advertising-pocalypse resulted in many companies pulling advertising from the online video site. Topics like hate speech, bullying, impersonation, and cyberbullying have seen new, higher laws affecting YouTubers big and small.
With the upcoming policy, YouTube will join a bevy of other companies, including Dick’s Sporting Goods and Walmart, that have enacted new restrictions on the promotion or sale of firearms in the wake of the Parkland shooting.