Youtube Shuts Down Popular Channel Because of "Call to Prayer" Video

Updates at bottom of page!

Earlier this week the popular Christian outreach youtube channel PPSIMMONS was "terminated" by youtube. The account, in "good standing", was closed sometime on April 24. When one of the moderators attempted to access the account on that morning he was greeted with:

 "This account has been terminated due to repeated or severe violations of our Community Guidelines and/or claims of copyright infringement."

This was an enigma if there ever was one. "Violations"? The PPSIMMONS account was, according to youtube themselves, in "good standing". In fact, the folks at PPSIMMONS confirmed this "good standing" the week before when they were slapped by youtube for a Trayvon Martin video they posted and were placed on six month "probation". When PPSIMMONS staff appealed the probation youtube responded with an apology and reinstated the account's "good standing". From youtube:

Dear ppsimmons:Thank you for submitting your video appeal to YouTube. After further review, we've determined that your video doesn't violate our Community Guidelines. Your video has been reinstated and your account is in good standing.

This email was sent to the PPSIMMONS ministry Apr 19 - the week before they shut down the channel. Now back to Apr 24. None of the moderators can access the channel. It's dead. No reason was offered by youtube other than that which everyone sees when they try to access it:  "This account has been terminated due to repeated or severe violations of our Community Guidelines and/or claims of copyright infringement."... Nice.

So they went through the appeals process as best they could. It was difficult since their account had been shut down. But they managed to squeak out an appeal to the youtube brass. The response they were given was nothing short of jaw-dropping. They cited the most recent video titled "An EMERGENCY Call To PRAYER! From Carl Gallups and PPSIMMONS Ministry". From youtube:

Penalty 2:
"An EMERGENCY Call To PRAYER! From Carl Gallups and PPSIMMONS Ministry"
formerly at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4A33hWaI60
Removed for violating our Terms of Use on 04/24/2012.
Please see http://www.youtube.com/t/terms and
http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines

Notice it says "Penalty 2". Penalty 1 was a video PPSIMMONS did on abortion a couple of years ago with graphic images and which was taken down. Youtube placed the account in "good standing" following that.

Now remember - the account was placed in good standing following the Trayvon video and for which youtube apologized. They shut down the account while it was in good standing! But that's not the strangest aspect of all this - as strange as that seems.

Penalty 2: "An EMERGENCY Call To PRAYER! From Carl Gallups and PPSIMMONS Ministry". What kind of video was this that so enraged youtube that they saw fit, without any warning at all, to terminate one of the most popular "Christian" channels on youtube? Was it full of naked ladies smoking crack? Was it full of blacks and Jews being slaughtered by a group of drunken white supremacists? Here it is - judge for yourself.

Well there you have it. A simple call to prayer. A call to the church to reach out to God for cleansing and holiness. One might be tempted to suspect that youtube was upset at the mentioning of homosexuality as being a "demonic grip" but the video was speaking directly to people who [claim to] believe the Bible and who [claim to] know Jesus as Lord. This video was not directed at the homosexual community at large. It was a "call to prayer". It attacked no one.

According to youtube's own guidelines [here], they claim: "We encourage free speech and defend everyone's right to express unpopular points of view." Now that they have shut down PPSIMMONS can they honestly make that claim? No - they cannot. The same paragraph in youtube's guidelines says "But we don't permit hate speech (speech which attacks or demeans a group based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, and sexual orientation/gender identity)." Yet the video is speaking to Christians, not homosexuals.

So it seems like youtube is violating it's own guidelines on this one. They are discriminating against a youtube user based on religious beliefs. Not only is that unconstitutional, it goes against their own rules of conduct.

A simple call to prayer. That's all it took to get PPSIMMONS jettisoned from youtube. Yet the ministry lives on. It lives on with this blog and on facebook. It lives on Dailymotion and yes, on countless other youtube channels where the material was "mirrored". PPSIMMONS lives - it will never be silenced.

UPDATE!... a nationally renowned attorney who was a fan of
PPSIMMONS has offered to take PPSIMMONS' case against YouTube
pro-Bono. Those discussions are underway at this writing.

UPDATE!... youtube has reinstated the PPSIMMONS channel!

Youtube Losing Big Accounts to Competitors Due to Lack of Oversight

Want to get a youtube user shut down because you don't like their message? It doesn't seem very difficult these days. The mega-popular Christian and political outreach channel "PPSIMMONS" (our namesake) found that out the hard way earlier this week when, quite unexpectedly, their channel was "terminated".

The reason given by youtube, available to see when you actually try to visit the channel home page, is:

This account has been terminated due to repeated or severe violations of our Community Guidelines and/or claims of copyright infringement.

In an interview with moderator and spokesman Mike Shoesmith, author of two of the PPSIMMONS resource books and frequent contributor to the channel content said in an interview that they are trying to reach youtube to have a dialogue on the matter. He also said they are moving operations to their popular facebook page.


"We are shocked by this - truly shocked" Mr. Shoesmith said. "We were placed on notice by youtube and put on six month probation for a Trayvon Martin video but we appealed it and youtube said they were wrong and placed our account back in good standing. A week later they shut us down completely without any warning".

Mr Shoesmith also said they have a popular facebook page and have been slowly moving video content over there. "Our facebook fans are the best and we appreciate their support. We have streaming news coverage and live interaction with members. It's a really great venue" Shoesmith said. "If youtube doesn't honor our requests for reinstatement then facebook will be a solid alternative".

Additionally PPSIMMONS is now, as of today, up and running on Dailymotion; a popular video sharing website used by many big names. They began uploading content to that site and is available for anyone to access. Dailymotion has many of the same features as youtube - embedding, commenting, sharing to social networking sites etc.

PPSIMMONS representative Mike Shoesmith told us it felt good to "break free from the youtube chains and have the flexibility to branch out knowing that our video content is not in any violation of copyright laws and that we can post to other sites and have access to our videos to use on blogs and social networking to promote our message".

PPSIMMONS had nearly twenty two thousand subscribers on their channel with tens of millions of views. Many of their videos had third party content which youtube permits as long as the user agrees to allow advertising on the video to promote the creator of the third party content. This allowed youtube to make a great deal of money off of the PPSIMMONS uploads without any money actually going to the people at PPSIMMONS. They were ok with that since it was a not-for-profit outreach anyway. The financial loss is strictly youtube's.

With all of the options out there youtube is certainly the most popular. But the question remains - for how long? As more alternative sites become better known when groups like PPSIMMONS promote them by moving their material and then linking from social networking websites, youtube would do well to heed the chatter out there; a warning that rough seas are ahead if they don't start investigating the flagging of content. Many other websites had PPSIMMONS videos embedded in their pages and when youtube pulled the plug on the entire account a great many other websites went dark as well - news sites, blogs, etc. How does that look when a video supposedly from youtube won't even play. Dailymotion is very facebook friendly and even allows facebook users to install an app on their pages which plays dailymotion videos. In many ways it is better than youtube.

There are campaigns which take place on youtube called "flagging campaigns" designed by groups to get individual channels shut down. For example, the PPSIMMONS channel had material which was hard-hitting toward the atheist and evolutionist community. It wasn't slanderous or mean. It simply pointed out all of the reasons people should avoid the pitfalls of jettisoning their beliefs and why the liberal, naturalistic worldview is indefensible. It was classy content and difficult to refute. And so, since PPSIMMONS had never been in direct violation of any policies, a flagging campaign triggered the closure of the channel.

This actually can lead to the channel being reinstated should youtube investigate further but much damage has been done by this and PPSIMMONS has already begun the process of moving on.

Should youtube be afraid of this? In fact they should. Youtube has been very comfortable for people because it is familiar and a household name. But don't forget - Lucky Strike and Pan Am were also once household names and look what happened there.