YouTube Has Been Sued For Allegedly Failing To Enforce A Prohibition On Animal Torture Videos

In a lawsuit, YouTube is accused of facilitating the creation, production, and distribution of animal torture videos by neglecting to delete them. In California Superior Court, the animal rights group Lady Freethinker filed a complaint against YouTube, accusing it of breaking of contract for failing to act against animal abuse videos. Lady Freethinker published an inquiry into staged animal rescue videos on YouTube earlier this year, in which dogs and cats were placed near snakes before being hauled away by humans. Animal abuse is prohibited by the Google-owned platform's standards, which include films showing a person purposefully causing an animal to suffer when it is not for normal objectives like hunting or food preparation. Animal rescue videos that have been manufactured and put the animal in dangerous situations are likewise forbidden. Despite this, the New York Times reported that on Monday, dozens of horrifying animal cruelty videos were still available on YouTube, some of which had been up for years.

However, a YouTube spokesman stated that the site agrees that content portraying animal abuse or violence has no place on the platform and that it has deleted hundreds of thousands of videos since extending its policy against animal abuse this year.