Donald Trump's YouTube Gains 100,000 Subscribers After U.S. Capitol Riot

President Donald Trump's YouTube account continued to attract masses of new subscribers in the wake of the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6. In the days after a violent mob of his supporters breached the security of the building in Washington, D.C. as part of an insurrection that left five dead, the president's YouTube followers surged by roughly 100,000, according to analytics firm Social Blade. Data suggests that since the attack last Wednesday, Trump's profile consistently gained between 10,000 and 30,000 new subs a day, spiking from 2.68 million subs on January 6 to 2.77 million on January 12—when it was temporarily suspended. Views on the Trump account's videos also appeared to surge, with Social Blade metrics showing a collective total of more than 2 million on January 7 and 3.8 million on January 8. In the week before the Capitol siege, no daily increase had surpassed 800,000. The YouTube account remained active even as the president's presence on other social media or technology platforms—including Facebook and Twitter—was being blocked or restricted to reduce the risk of him inciting further civil unrest or violence. A slew of companies have since removed Trump—or Trump-related content—from their sites, including TikTok, Snapchat, Twitch, Reddit, Shopify and Discord. The silencing has now left the outgoing president in a state of social media homelessness. Speculation that he could join the "free speech" social network Parler halted this week when the platform was removed from the web by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for failing to moderate extremist content, while its app was removed by Google and Apple.

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YouTube executives confirmed on Tuesday that Trump's account would not be allowed to share any new videos for a week following a review of new uploads. "In light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence, we removed new content uploaded to Donald J. Trump's channel for violating our policies," YouTube said. "It now has its 1st strike & is temporarily prevented from uploading new content for a *minimum* of 7 days. Given the ongoing concerns about violence, we will also be indefinitely disabling comments on President Trump's channel, as we've done to other channels where there are safety concerns found in the comments section." YouTube has been contacted for comment by Newsweek. Under the website's tiered enforcement system, a second strike would typically result in a two-week suspension, while a third would result in the channel's termination. The Google-owned platform did not confirm which videos had broken its policies, but screenshots taken by reporter Matthew Keys indicated they were re-uploads of content from a pro-Trump news platform called One America News Network (OANN). Alongside Facebook and Twitter, YouTube previously removed Trump's video uploaded as the Capitol attack was ongoing, in which he called the mob "very special." Before departing to Texas on Tuesday, Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland that "big tech"—a term used to describe mainstream social media and tech platforms—had made a "terrible mistake," seemingly referencing his bans. According to a transcript, he said: "It causes a lot of problems and a lot of danger. Big mistake. They shouldn't be doing it. But there's always a counter move when they do that. I've never seen such anger as I see right now, and that's a terrible thing." President Trump previously complained in an executive order in May 2020 that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube had grown to wield "immense, if not unprecedented, power to... disappear information and to control what people see or do not see."