#pfaw

Norman Lear died at the age of 101 this week. Jimmy Kimmel's tribute to him captured brilliantly what Lear was all about – and was appropriately funny as well.

Lear may be best remembered for making sitcoms which resembled real life a bit more while innovatively integrating social commentary into them.

But Lear was also a lifelong progressive who founded People For the American Way (PFAW).

Home - People For the American Way

A notable offshoot of PFAW is Right Wing Watch.

Homepage | Right Wing Watch

Right Wing Watch is a must for keeping an eye on extremists like House Speaker Mike Johnson.

House Speaker Mike Johnson Will Be Honored Tonight at Christian Nationalist Gathering

This week we're reading a fic from @altokiwi!

It's a One Piece nightmare Hurt/Comfort fic featuring Sanji and Zoro! Check it out at the links below!

This one is an original dream fic written by decoyjaman

Justin Baragona and Adam Rawnsley at The Daily Beast:

After left-wing media watchdog Right Wing Watch had been informed that its channel had been permanently suspended from YouTube on Monday morning, the online video platform reversed course hours later and reinstated the channel.

“Right Wing Watch’s YouTube channel was mistakenly suspended, but upon further review, has now been reinstated,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Daily Beast on Monday afternoon. The social-media site also suggested that the issue was a mistake due to high volume of content and that they attempted to move quickly to undo the ban.

Right Wing Watch also confirmed that YouTube informed the site on Monday afternoon that their channel was back online.

“We are glad that by reinstating our account, YouTube recognizes our position that there is a world of difference between reporting on offensive activities and committing them,” Right Wing Watch director Adele Stan said in a statement after the reinstatement. “Without the ability to accurately portray dangerous behavior, meaningful journalism and public education about that behavior would cease to exist.”

Stan added, “We hope this is the end of a years-long struggle with YouTube to understand the nature of our work. We also hope the platform will become more transparent about the process it uses to determine whether a user has violated its rules, which has always been opaque and has led to frustrating and inexplicable decisions and reversals such as the one we experienced today. We remain dedicated to exposing threatening and harmful activities on the Far Right and we are glad to have YouTube again available to us to continue our work.”

According to screenshots posted by RWW on Monday morning, the Google-owned video platform informed the group that their official YouTube channel would be permanently removed from the site due to numerous violations of its community guidelines.

Right Wing Watch appealed the suspension, which was also denied by YouTube, with the social-media site again claiming that the watchdog group—which monitors disinformation, conspiracies, and violent rhetoric from far-right media outlets and personalities—was in violation of its guidelines and terms of service.

Meanwhile, many of the far-right extremists merely exposed by RWW remain on the platform.

[...]

Right Wing Watch senior fellow Kyle Mantyla told The Daily Beast that this had been an ongoing problem with YouTube for years, despite their efforts to make clear to the platform that their videos worked to expose extremism and contained disclaimers to that effect.

He also noted that the issues with YouTube had escalated over the past year, as the platform has tried to crack down on COVID-19 misinformation and election-related conspiracies, roping in much of RWW’s efforts to expose this type of rhetoric.

Mantyla said that YouTube recently gave the RWW channel—which has roughly 60,000 subscribers—two strikes in April over videos it posted, prompting the watchdog to refrain from posting more content to the site until the strikes dropped off after 90 days. (Right Wing Watch had largely relied on rival platform Vimeo to host its videos in the meantime.)

“And then they found some video from eight years ago that they flagged, took that down, and that was our third strike,” he explained. “And they took down our entire account.”

According to Mantyla, the third strike occurred last week and the channel was taken down at that point. Notification that their appeal was rejected, however, wasn’t sent until early Monday morning, when Right Wing Watch went public about the ban.