Google’s YouTube division announced that after a long hiatus, former US President Donald Trump is allowed to upload new videos to his official channel. Shortly after the riots at the US Capital building in Washington DC on January 6, 2021, along with bans from other social networks, Google also suspended the former president’s YouTube account.
In a post on the YouTube Insider Twitter page, the company says it made this decision, emphasizing that voters should receive equal news in the upcoming 2024 US Presidential election. Trump is running for the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States in 2024.
The post also states that Donald Trump’s YouTube channel, which has more than two million subscribers, “will continue to be subject to the service’s policies.”
1/ Starting today, the Donald J. Trump channel is no longer restricted and can upload new content. We carefully evaluated the continued risk of real-world violence, while balancing the chance for voters to hear equally from major national candidates in the run up to an election.
— YouTubeInsider (@YouTubeInsider) March 17, 2023
Bans on Trump’s Twitter page were also lifted by CEO Elon Musk in November 2022. Meta had released the former president’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in early 2023. Trump is still prohibited from posting on Amazon’s Twitch service.
At the time of this writing, Trump had not yet published any notable content on his social platforms that had lifted his previous bans. There are rumors that Trump has signed an exclusive deal with the social network Truth Social, which he helped fund. This deal is said to expire in June 2023. In other words, it will not come as a surprise to anyone that Trump will start pouring messages on social media platforms that have lifted his ban as of June 2023.