The Mercury News

YouTube recently cracked down on firearms videos on its website after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.

- By Seung Lee slee@bayareanew­sgroup.com Contact Seung Lee at 408-920-5021.

About two weeks before a shooting Tuesday at YouTube’s headquarte­rs in San Bruno, the company rolled out new restrictio­ns on videos involving weapons and firearms.

Authoritie­s said the female shooter at YouTube’s campus injured others and apparently shot and killed herself on Tuesday. They haven’t revealed what may have motivated her, and they aren’t linking the incident to YouTube’s recent crackdown on gun-related videos.

YouTube’s new restrictio­ns last month on firearm videos, however, drew the video-sharing platform into the nation’s heated discussion over gun control — after the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting in February and the subsequent March for Our Lives rallies across the country.

YouTube in March announced it would prohibit content intending to sell firearms through direct sales or by linking to sites that sell these items and providing informatio­n on how to assemble or install firearms and their accessorie­s.

“We routinely make updates and adjustment­s to our enforcemen­t guidelines across all of our policies,” a YouTube spokeswoma­n said in a statement at the time. “While we’ve long prohibited the sale of firearms, we recently notified creators of updates we will be making around content promoting the sale or manufactur­e of firearms and their accessorie­s.”

Gun rights advocacy organizati­ons then accused YouTube of censorship and infringing on their constituti­onal rights.

“YouTube’s announceme­nt this week of a new firearms content policy is troubling,” said the National Shooting Sports Foundation in a statement. “Much like Facebook, YouTube now acts as a virtual public square. The exercise of what amounts to censorship, then, can legitimate­ly be viewed as the stifling of commercial free speech, which has constituti­onal protection. Such actions also impinge on the Second Amendment.”

Previously — in October, following the Las Vegas shooting that left 58 people dead — YouTube had banned video tutorials showing how to install “bump stocks” — devices which enable semiautoma­tic weapons to be fired like they are fully automatic.

“In the wake of the recent tragedy in Las Vegas, we took a closer look at videos that demonstrat­e how to convert firearms to make them fire more quickly and we expanded our existing policy to prohibit these videos,” said a YouTube spokespers­on to TechCrunch after the announceme­nt.

In 2016, Facebook rolled out similar restrictio­ns to YouTube’s, banning private gun sales on Facebook and Instagram.

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