What’s the news: Videos from the YouTube channels of Mojo Story, a news portal, and YouTuber Tanmay Bhat were deleted on June 5, 2023. While Bhat appealed to the platform for help on the same day, Mojo Story Editor Barkha Dutt criticised YouTube for failing to address previous concerns about potential hacking. https://twitter.com/BDUTT/status/1665513715272130560 https://twitter.com/thetanmay/status/1665462449242357760 Why it matters: As per Dutt’s account, the channel had already flagged concerns about potential hacking to YouTube. Yet even after the hacking, the platform said it is still investigating the matter, indicating gross apathy on its end regarding user grievances. Mojo Story had uploaded various video coverage about incidents in India, including ground coverage of the Covid-19 situation in India. Meanwhile, Tanmay Bhat has previously been involved in free speech issues. So, the deletion of all of their content also comes off as a failure to protect their right to speech online as well as journalistic rights. What happened with Mojo Story? Dutt on Monday morning announced on a Twitter thread that a hacker deleted 11,000 videos uploaded on the news portal’s YouTube channel over the past four years. A quick online search for the 'Mojo Story YouTube channel' this morning showed that the channel name had been renamed to “teslanewstar05,” with a single video featuring Tesla CEO Elon Musk. She tagged YouTube CEO Neal Mohan and talked about how her team had asked the platform to freeze their account so that hackers could not alter it but were repeatedly told: “process of investigation has…
