A Journalist Reported From Palestine. YouTube Deleted His Account Claiming He’s an Iranian Agent |
In February 2024, without warning, YouTube deleted the account of independent British journalist Robert Inlakesh.
His YouTube page featured dozens of videos, including numerous livestreams documenting Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank. In a decade covering Palestine and Israel, he had captured video of Israeli authorities demolishing Palestinian homes, police harassing Palestinian drivers, and Israeli soldiers shooting at Palestinian civilians and journalists during protests in front of illegal Israeli settlements. In an instant, all of that footage was gone.
In July, YouTube deleted Inlakesh’s private backup account. And in August, Google, YouTube’s parent company, deleted his Google account, including his Gmail and his archive of documents and writings.
The tech giant initially claimed Inlakesh’s account violated YouTube’s community guidelines. Months later, the company justified his account termination by alleging his page contained spam or scam content.
However, when The Intercept inquired further about Inlakesh’s case, nearly two years after his account was deleted, YouTube provided a separate and wholly different explanation for the termination: a connection to an Iranian influence campaign.
YouTube declined to provide evidence to support this claim, stating that the company doesn’t discuss how it detects influence operations. Inlakesh remains unable to make new Google accounts, preventing him from sharing his video journalism on the largest English language video platform.
Inlakesh, now a freelance journalist, acknowledged that from 2019 to 2021 he worked from the London office of the Iranian state-owned media organization Press TV, which is under U.S. sanctions. Even so, Inlakesh said that should not have led to the erasure of his entire YouTube account, the vast majority of which was his own independent content that was posted before or after his time at Press TV.
A public Google document from the month Inlakesh’s account was deleted notes that the company had recently closed more than 30 accounts it alleged were linked to Iran that had posted content critical of Israel and its war on Gaza. The company did not respond when asked specifically if Inlakesh’s account was among those mentioned in the document.
Inlakesh said he felt like he was targeted not due to his former employer but because of his journalism about Palestine, especially amid the increasingly common trend of pro-Israeli censorship among Big Tech companies.
“What are the implications of this, not just for me, but for other journalists?” Inlakesh told The Intercept. “To do this and not to provide me with any information — you’re basically saying I’m a foreign agent of Iran for working with an outlet; that’s the implication. You have to provide some evidence for that. Where’s your documentation?”
Misdirection and Lack of Answers
Over the past couple years, YouTube and Google’s explanations given for the terminations of Inlakesh’s accounts have been inconsistent and vague.
YouTube first accused Inlakesh of “severe or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines.” When a Google employee, Marc Cohen, noticed Inlakesh’s public outcry about his account termination in February 2024, he decided to get involved. Cohen filed a support ticket on Google’s internal issue tracker system, “the Buganizer,” asking why a journalist’s account was deleted. Failing to get an answer internally, Cohen went public with his questions that March. After drawing the attention of the YouTube team on Twitter, he said he eventually received an internal response from Google which claimed that Inlakesh’s account had been terminated owing to “scam, deceptive or spam content.”
Cohen, who resigned from Google later that year over its support of the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza, said had he not gotten involved, Inlakesh would have been left with even less information.
“They get away with that because they’re Google,” Cohen said. “What are you going to do? Go hire a lawyer and sue Google? You have no choice.”
When Inlakesh’s Gmail account was deleted this year, Google said his account had been “used to impersonate someone or misrepresent yourself,” which Google said is a violation of its policies. Inlakesh appealed three times but was given no........