Tech giant YouTube has suspended Sky News Australia’s popular channel from the platform for a week following a review of old uploaded videos.
Sky News Australia has been temporarily suspended by YouTube following a review of old videos published to the channel.
The one-week suspension by YouTube follows a review of content for compliance with YouTube’s policies on COVID-19 which are subject to change in response to changes to global or local health authority guidance on the virus.
Sky News Australia acknowledges YouTube’s right to enforce its policies and looks forward to continuing to publish its popular news and analysis content back to its audience of 1.85 million YouTube subscribers shortly.
A Sky News Australia spokesperson said: “We support broad discussion and debate on a wide range of topics and perspectives which is vital to any democracy.
“We take our commitment to meeting editorial and community expectations seriously.”
YouTube responded to media requests mentioning its “denial of COVID-19” policies but it later dropped that reference in future media statements.
Sky News Australia expressly rejects that any host has ever denied the existence of COVID-19 as was implied, and no such videos were ever published or removed.
The Sky News Australia YouTube channel has published more than 20,000 videos over the past year.
With 1.85 million subscribers, ‘Sky News Australia’ on YouTube has 400,000 subscribers more than ABC News, and is more popular than all three of Australia’s commercial news network’s YouTube channels combined.
It was recently revealed that Sky News Australia has become one of the country’s most engaging news brands across multiple digital platforms and is reaching more than a third of all Australians each month.
