NORTHAMPTON — An extensive archive of government meetings overseen by Northampton Open Media on its YouTube channel has been taken down by YouTube for an alleged violation of the website’s sex and nudity policy.
The notice sent by YouTube to the local media’s account did not elaborate on the exact videos and content that breached the company’s rules, nor did it give any prior warning, said P. Al Williams, director of Northampton Open Media (NOM).
He speculates the infraction was due to “zoom bombing” — when an anonymous person inserts lewd images or audio into a professional meeting — and possible misinterpretations from Google’s artificial intelligence that YouTube uses to monitor the site.
“We have a decade of pretty much consistent use of what we do: civic responsibility and transparency,” Williams said. “Even YouTube says it looks at context in its policy.”
For the last decade, NOM’s Government Media Archive YouTube channel has brought live coverage and archived meetings to the city and its residents, from City Council and School Committee to any of the dozens of other boards and committees that meet throughout the year.
In a message to viewers posted on Facebook Wednesday afternoon, NOM said there has never been an act of intentionally uploading inappropriate content to the channel. NOM has appealed the action to YouTube, and reached out to contacts who may be able to assist in the appeals process.
In the meantime, NOM has started a new YouTube channel called Northampton Open Media Government Coverage Backup so that people can access content as quickly as possible. Old meeting records have been uploaded to an Internet Archive website, but there is a month of recordings missing from the site due to slow backup.
According to Google Community Guidelines, YouTube monitors content through a strike system. The first offense receives a warning. A second offense within a 90-day period will result in a strike. The violation comes with a notice about the removal of the video, an explanation of what policy it broke, and an appeal option. After three strikes, the channel is permanently removed.
“They took it down without any warning or strikes,” Williams said. “Their policy said for egregious, highly insensitive videos, the channel goes down immediately. I cannot imagine how that would be possible in our case.”
The Google Transparency Centre says the search engine uses “a combination of automated and human tools” to locate and address policy violations. Last week, Forbes reported that the company will use AI to manage the amount of AI content on the platform.
“I know there’s an increased reliance on AI to evaluate content,” Williams said. “I don’t have a deep understanding of how good AI is at doing that.”
NOM has previously received strikes for music used in videos, which violates the fair use policy. When Williams appealed, YouTube was “very unresponsive.”
“I’m very concerned about that,” he said.
In most cases, NOM edits out any explicit content before uploading a meeting recording to YouTube. The unedited version remains on the Internet Archive site to preserve transparency and history. But Williams said people informed him that recently, NOM staff might have missed a couple instances of bad content getting through.
“One of the challenges is also that there are so many meetings, there is no way as a staff to look at every single second of every meeting,” he said.
While Williams hopes NOM can remain on YouTube, he has begun exploring other ways to broadcast media, such as Roku or a phone app. An internal archival server could prevent loss of digital recordings, he said.
As cable cords are cut, local access channels have not only lost a way of transmitting information, but a significant portion of funds. NOM lost 20% of its budget last year alone.
“Generally, we have huge funding challenge ahead of us as an organization,” he said.
“In many ways we’re looking into achieving sustainability, which is also very challenging.
If the public does value us, they either need to speak to local government or support us directly.”