From the network to digital TV. After the closure of the ByoBlu channel by YouTube, Claudio Messora ‘s “Really Tv” takes a step towards television. “They closed Byoblu”, Messora wrote on his website announcing the suspension of his channel with the removal of “14 years of content”. “It is time to launch a challenge”, he added, launching a crowdfunding campaign to buy a national channel on digital terrestrial, which has already reached and exceeded the target of 150 thousand euros. THE MOTIVATIONS OF YOUTUBE (AND MESSORA)
To understand the reasons that led the YouTube platform to close the channel, just enter the Byoblu channel. “This account has been closed for violation of the YouTube Community Rules”, we read, but in the post also sent via email by Messora we read that the reason would be the removal of a video of September 2020 “in which the Pan-African activist spoke Mohamed Konare ”, but no further details are offered, apart from a history of what happened in the past months, when the Messora website / newspaper had already attracted the attention of Google. PREVIOUS
Back in 2017, Google had banned ByoBlu from AdSense, the advertising network of the Mountain View giant, after deciding to make its selection criteria more rigorous, thus excluding sites that offered deceptive content. Among these, the Messora site. Most recently, in September, he was sanctioned with a week-long suspension due to a service that questioned the efficacy of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine.
ByoBlu had talked about an attack on freedom of expression on the net, but Massimo Mantellini, expert in digital culture, network policy, privacy and the right to access, had expressed doubts: “From such an information mechanism (dissemination of unverified news, ed) it will no longer be possible to extract money with the current facility (even if there are already alternative advertising circuits to AdSense that will be happy to welcome new customers) “. NEWSPAPERS AGAINST BIG PLATFORMS
The byoblu.com site is a newspaper registered at the Court of Milan, also for this reason those who come forward in its defense bring the subject of freedom of information and the right to press. “Fake news – wrote Carlo Alberto Carnevale-Maffe, who in the past had already expressed himself on the events of ByoBlu – have always been a commercial product. When they become intolerable, as in the case of #Byoblu, the distributor that financed them stops doing it. And the first rule of trade, beauty ” IN DEFENSE OF MESSORA
Already yesterday evening, when the news spread, many personalities from the world of politics – but not only – who over the years have collaborated with Messora expressed their solidarity. From Gianluigi Paragone to Guido Crosetto, Paolo Becchi, Giuseppe Palma, up to the parliamentarians Claudio Borghi and Alberto Bagnai. The latter brought the matter to the Senate, asking to be able to set up a debate on the issues of freedom on the net and to arrive at a document that would turn into an act of guidance to the government and to favor the process of a bill on this matter “that has as a minimum content the request to screen the registered newspapers that are on the web by the reporting mechanism, the mechanism used by the digital squads of organized haters to remove the content they do not like”.
