YouTube is deleting two more accounts linked to Yemen's Ansarullah

  American multinational technology company Google has removed two more accounts linked to the Yemeni resistance movement Ansarullah from its subsidiary online video-sharing platform YouTube. According to Arabic-language Yemeni TV channel al-Masirah, the tech giant took the measure on Tuesday against al-Furqan TV and culture and media institute Fikrah. In a brief statement, Fikrah condemned the deletion of her YouTube account as a cruel act, stressing that the social media platform clearly applies double standards and has no reservations about blocking access to posts that shed light on the crisis in Yemen and that of Saudi Arabia-led military attack against the Arab nation.

Al-Furqan TV also announced that YouTube's decision exposed its hypocrisy and showed it was in league with the Saudi-led war coalition. Media office Ansarullah said the move was related to attempts by the enemy to target Yemeni social media accounts. The enemy is trying to hide its crimes against the Yemeni nation and through such actions stifle the voice of truth and justice, it said. This is not the first time that YouTube and other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have deleted Yemeni accounts or pages without prior notice or justification.

On July 17, YouTube "arbitrarily" blocked access to 18 channels of the media office of the Operations Command Center in Yemen, as well as the Ansarullah movement and its arts and documentary production unit. The blocked channels reportedly had more than 500,000 subscribers with over 7,000 videos and more than 90 million views. At the time, the media office of Yemen's Operations Command Center called the move an act of "intellectual terrorism," noting that YouTube was "attempting to use the media resources of the Saudi-led aggression coalition for their colonial goals." As early as late June 2021, the US Department of Justice confiscated the website domain of the Yemeni Arabic-language television station al-Masirah, as well as nearly three dozen other regional websites.

Websites that were suddenly taken offline included the English-language Iranian television news channel Press TV, its Arabic channel al-Alam, and three websites belonging to the Iraqi anti-terrorist group Kata'ib Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia launched a brutal war of aggression against Yemen in March 2015, enlisting the support of some of its regional allies, including the United Arab Emirates, and massive shipments of modern weapons from the US and western Europe. Western governments expanded their political and logistical support for Riyadh in its failed attempt to return power in Yemen to the country's previously Saudi-installed government. Former Yemeni Prime Minister Abed Rabbo Mansur Hadi resigned at the end of 2014 and later fled to Riyadh due to a political conflict with Ansarullah. The movement managed Yemen's affairs in the absence of a functioning government. The war resulted in the killing of tens of thousands of Yemenis and turned the entire country into the scene of the world's worst humanitarian crisis.