A conservative influencer says his channel was permanently banned from YouTube after releasing an interview with GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
"In the past 3 months I’ve taken this channel from 0 to 150,000 subs and 185 million views. This is blatant censorship in front of our eyes," Shane Ginsberg, who uses the handle @shaneyyricch, wrote on X. "I had zero strikes on this channel and was given no reason for the ban. I will continue posting my content as planned on ???? and will become one of the biggest creators on this platform."
Ginsberg included a screenshot of the message he received from YouTube, which advised him that the company had found "severe or repeated violations" of its Community Guidelines.
The notice said the decision could be appealed but stated that any new channels created by him "will be terminated if you circumvent a strike restriction or previous termination."
Ramaswamy blasted YouTube's decision, writing Wednesday morning: "If Google is going to rig this election, just end the charade & say so. That seems to be the message they’re sending."
"Big Tech censorship to rig an election…who would have ever imagined," he said in a separate post.
Ginsberg later shared the video with Ramaswamy on X that he believes prompted the ban, asking, "What could they possibly be afraid of?"
In the video, Ginsberg works to solve a Rubik's cube as Ramaswamy details his goals if he is elected president.
Much of the brief video focused on Ramaswamy's proposed election reforms, including consolidating voting to a single day, making Election Day a national holiday, requiring voter ID, using only paper ballots, and making English the only language on a ballot.
"It's not a Black idea, it's not a white idea, it's an American idea," Ramaswamy said before going on to address immigration. "And we fought a revolution to secure it. You want to close your borders. That's what it means to be a country. A country without borders isn't a country. I'll use our own military to protect against our own southern border's invasion rather than somebody else's border invasion halfway around the world."
He called for the end to birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and argued against affirmative action-like policies.
"The best person gets the job, no matter the gender, no matter the race, no matter the sexuality," he said. "I'm going to fix that starting with our woke indoctrination in our military. We're done with that so our military actually protects this country."
Toward the end of the video, Ramaswamy reiterated his plan to scrap the federal workforce by 75%, alleging that those bureaucrats are part of "the deep state."
"The people who we elect to run the government should be the ones who actually run the government, not the shadow government and the deep state," he told Ginsberg. "So you know what? I'm going to fire 75% of those federal bureaucrats just as fast as you solved that Rubik's cube."
The video was filmed in Iowa, where the 38-year-old entrepreneur has been prolifically campaigning ahead of Jan. 15's Republican caucus in the state.
Recent primary polling puts Ramaswamy at 7% on average in Iowa and 4% on average nationwide, according to RealClearPolitics.
The Daily Dot has reached out to both Ginsberg and Google for comment.
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