IS IT THE TRUTH?
93-year-old activist-YouTuber falsely accused of broadcasting porn
Metta Spencer. Photo courtesy of mettaspencer.com
12/9/24, 6:06 AM
A 93-year-old climate activist and YouTube content creator recently had her channel suspended after being falsely accused of broadcasting explicit content.
Metta Spencer, a former sociology professor at the University of Toronto in Canada, was hosting a live climate change discussion on October 27 when hackers hijacked the broadcast and displayed pornographic videos.
"Somebody busts in and starts showing pornographic videos ... and I couldn't get rid of them. They'd taken over my computer," she was quoted as saying by CBC Toronto.
She eventually regained control of the broadcast, resumed her "To Save the World" session, and removed the hackers.
Soon after, Spencer discovered her channel—home to over 600 videos featuring global leaders and advocacy groups tackling issues like climate change, peace, and famine—had been deleted.
As reported by CBC Toronto, an email from YouTube cited a violation of community standards during Spencer's live broadcast as the reason for the channel's deactivation.
"I have hour-long forum discussions that I have produced, and they were all on YouTube and they took them all out," she recalled.
Despite contacting YouTube to explain the hacking incident, Spencer was initially unable to restore her channel. It wasn't until CBC Toronto reached out to Google's parent company that her channel was reinstated.
Spencer expressed her relief upon recovering her channel, saying, "For me, it would have been many years of my life missing."
With over a thousand subscribers, her channel had featured groups such as the Grandmothers Act to Save the Planet (GASP), a dynamic organization of Canadian grandmothers actively addressing climate change through lobbying, awareness campaigns, and public demonstrations.