The official YouTube account which broadcasts Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s morning news conferences has been suspended, in what his spokesperson is condemning as an act of political censorship.
"With no apparent justification, YouTube suspended the account of CEPROPIE [Center for the Production of News and Special Programs], which broadcasts the official morning press conferences," Lopez Obrador’s spokesperson, Jesús Cuevas, wrote on social media Wednesday.
"We demand that the platform respects the official accounts for broadcasting the president’s conferences.”
The president’s heavy reliance on the platform could mean a serious blow to his ability to get his message out. And that amounts to an "unintentional censorship strategy," his spokesperson has pointed out.
"It is more about censorship than economics because they take down the livestream, they take down the [press] conference, and that is the effect it achieves," Cuevas said Wednesday, noting: "if the platform does not investigate and immediately and permissively takes down the images, it is resorting to an unintentional censorship strategy."
What’s more, the reasons for the suspension must be spurious, Cuevas insisted, because "there is nothing but the president's opinions and original material" on the channel.
"There is nothing that anyone can claim the rights to regarding those images," he explained.
The episode is drawing comparisons to the social media suspensions of former US President Donald Trump by Twitter and Facebook in 2021, which Lopez Obrador condemned at the time as a "bad sign" for freedom of expression.
“I don’t like anybody being censored or having the right to post a message on Twitter or Facebook taken away," the president then explained.
"I don’t agree with that, I don’t accept that," Lopez Obrador said, adding that the suspension resembled "a court of censorship like the Inquisition to manage public opinion."