ZitatYouTube has removed the most popular channel focused on Chinese politics from its search suggestions just as YouTube’s parent company, Google, faces scrutiny for allegedly developing a censored web search app for the Chinese market.
While typing into the YouTube search bar, the website provides a drop-down list of suggested search queries, which appears to consist of popular searches, videos, and channels.
But typing in “China Uncensored” yields no suggestions, despite the fact that a channel of exactly that name has been active on YouTube for six years and currently has 600,000 subscribers. The Epoch Times couldn’t find any other channel focusing on Chinese politics with a larger subscriber base.
China Uncensored, hosted by Chris Chappell, adopts a late night show format and mixes humor with serious analysis of Chinese politics and society. It also regularly picks apart the repression of Chinese people by the ruling communist regime, including topics deemed “sensitive,” such as its persecution of rights activists, Falun Gong practitioners, and house Christians.
“We report on Chinese censorship all the time. I mean, that’s literally in our name—China Uncensored,” Chappell said in a statement to The Epoch Times. “We’ve also reported on Google’s behavior in China. Now I’m not saying Google is intentionally censoring our YouTube channel in their search results. But if they are, well, I guess it means we’re doing something right.”