YouTube unblocks Trump – just in time for the election campaign
On Friday, Alphabet, the owner of YouTube, announced the lifting of restrictions on former US President Donald Trump’s channel after more than two years of blocking.
This was reported by Reuters.
Trump can now add videos to his YouTube account, which was blocked along with other social media platforms for calling for violence during the attack on the Capitol by his supporters in January 2021.
YouTube explains its decision as follows: “We carefully examined the sustained threat of real-world violence and weighed the ability of voters to listen to key national candidates before the election.”
In November 2022, Trump’s Twitter account was unblocked, and in February, Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, announced a similar decision. In total, the former US president can now reach 146 million followers amid the upcoming presidential election in 2024.
However, after unblocking his accounts, Trump has not posted a single post. Instead, he has been using Truth Social, a platform he founded in late 2021 and has nearly five million followers there.
Opponents of Trump’s return point to his posts on Truth Social as evidence that he still poses the same threat that led various social media outlets to suspend his accounts in 2021.
According to media reports, Trump is planning to return to Twitter and Facebook ahead of the 2024 elections and his campaign is intensely preparing for this.
At the time of publication, Trump’s YouTube account has more than 2.6 million subscribers.
