This morning the Northampton Open Media Northampton Government Media Archive YouTube channel was taken down by YouTube for a violation of the sex and nudity policy. This channel's sole function has been to bring live coverage and provide archived meetings to the City of Northampton and its constituents for over a decade. This includes covering things like City council meetings, School Committee meetings, Public Works meetings, and so on. We have made consistent strides to improve every aspect of such coverage. There has never been any act of intentionally uploading any inappropriate content to the channel. In fact, it was actively begun as a project and firewalled from Northampton Open Media's other YouTube channel in the case that some mistake would lead to taking down this essential government information. YouTube did not cite any examples of content in its decision. Nor did it provide us with any warnings regarding content, as it claims is policy. We have some theories as to what may have occurred, including recent incidents of "zoom bombing" as well as the possibility of a Google AI misevaluating content. We have filed an appeal to YouTube. In the meantime our goal is to continue to provide these services to the city of Northampton and the community at large. We have reached out to contacts who we believe may be able to help us in making progress with YouTube. We have started a new (hopefully temporary) YouTube channel so that you can have access to content as quickly as possible. That new channel is here - [https://www.youtube.com/@NorthamptonOpenMediaGovernment](https://www.youtube.com/@NorthamptonOpenMediaGovernment) We will not be able to confirm that we can stream live on this channel until tomorrow, but will provide an update when we do. In either case we will also be streaming tomorrow's meeting live as well on our major YouTube page here - [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrPYHOqa6ORMW5zNNQehBjg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrPYHOqa6ORMW5zNNQehBjg) You may also be looking for past meetings and proceedings which can still be found here, on our online backup library at archive.org - [https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22NCTV+Government+Video+Archive%22\&sort=-date](https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22NCTV+Government+Video+Archive%22&sort=-date) This backup currently only goes back to the end of 2025, due to some recent issues around archiving speeds caused by YouTube's recent anti-scraping technology meant to combat LLM AI from scraping the site. We still have copies of the meetings since that point, but it will take some time before we can download them from our broadcast server and populate them online. Please bear with us and contact us should you have emergency need for something. We will do our best. Additionally, we are currently at work on expanded ways for you to reach this content, on our web site, your smart phone, over Apple and Roku services, utilizing various apps. In this way in addition to addressing this particular problem we are actively future proofing and anticipating your needs for accessibility and transparency to your local government and community. Please support us if you value this work. Our own funding is at real threat. NOM ‘s income dropped by 20% last year and will continue to do so as cord cutting continues in the community. We are actively seeking new ways to ensure we remain in community for this work. If you are interested, you can sign up to support us at [https://www.patreon.com/join/northamptonopenmedia?](https://www.patreon.com/join/northamptonopenmedia?)
