The music video for the song Plastic is fantastic forbidden to censored by YouTube? Released in 1990, this title by the Nantes group Elmer Food Beat is part of the album 30 cm. It aimed to promote the use of condoms, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. The Ministry of Health had even included it in its prevention campaigns.
The song, published on the platform in 2008, now has nearly 985,000 views. But a sequence disturbs the algorithms of the online video giant: at the second minute, we see a man slipping his hand in his pants. This constitutes according to YouTube “inappropriate content for certain users”. On Monday, the clip was accompanied by a disclaimer emphasizing the “inappropriate for some users” character.
A decision deemed “distressing” by Anne-Claire Galesne, the group’s press officer who was notified by email Monday morning. “Our future is therefore that of a sanitized, hidden, veiled society, where, in addition to the puritanical morality of some, omnipresent and omnipotent algorithms will decide what everyone is entitled to see or not to see”, confides she told Ocean Press.
On Tuesday, the warning seemed to have disappeared. Contacted, the press officer explains that she is trying to join the platform in vain, and is delighted “to have perhaps made YouTube bend”. “Maybe there are still human beings behind YouTube,” she adds.
The rock band will release a new album on May 5, entitled Le Bruit des Potes. And by chance, two of his titles, J’rêve la nuit and L’amour dure precisely evoke the theme of censorship…
