An Asian Uber Driver Was Attacked by a Mob. Then YouTube Took Down His Video

In February, Google CEO Sundar Pichai Tweeted about how we shouldn’t let violence against Asian Americans “fade from the headlines.” He assured the general public that “all of us at Google” continue to “stand with and support you”; Google was going to work to #StopAsianHate.

Those words are unlikely to be comforting to Vincent Kang.

In mid-May, the West Virginia native and Uber driver arrived for a pickup in Morgantown when he was greeted with a mob of people who were involved in some kind of fist fight. He soon discovered that his intended passengers were fighting with people in the crowd.

Those passengers fled to his car, and the mob attacked them, Kang, and even the car itself, doing as much as $1500 in damage. MetroNews, a West Virginia news outlet, covered the mob attack.

Shortly after that attack, Kang set up a GoFundMe to help pay for the damages. (Full disclosure, I pitched into Kang’s GoFundMe before deciding to write this story.)

“What I find most ridiculous is that the ‘take’ for Uber is often over 50% of the fare, especially with the $3.10 "safe ride fee" but their deductible for incidents like this is $2500,” he told me over e-mail. “My own insurance disclaimed the event because of Uber. So I get the entire bill.”

As evidence of the assault, Kang uploaded a video onto YouTube, which is owned and operated by the aforementioned Google. The MetroNews embedded the same clip.

But if you try to watch it now, you’ll find a message from YouTube noting that the video violated its Terms of Service.

“Youtube simply said that the videos violated ‘community standards’. I appealed and they quickly denied it,” he told me over e-mail. “Currently I have a ‘strike’ for uploading them so I cannot upload any videos to YouTube at this time.”

I reached out to Google’s press office and asked them what exactly about Kang’s video violated the service. Elena Hernandez, who works in the office, told me that the “video violated our policies on violent and graphic content.” She linked me to this page that says that “violent or gory content intended to shock or disgust viewers, or content encouraging others to commit violence acts are not allowed on YouTube.”

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It’s not clear how exactly this policy is enforced. You can find all kinds of violent content on YouTube, including clips of political violence. Kang also uploaded the videos to Twitter, which has not taken them down:

For his part, Kang doesn’t know for sure that the violence he faced was racially motivated. “I do not know what the other attackers were thinking in attacking me or my vehicle. It is possible that race could have played a role in their deciding to attack, but I cannot know,” he told me.

But he’s worried that the local city government has made this violence more likely. “Elimination of overtime combined with high officer attrition due to the events of this past year would explain why there were no cops out and why I went through this attack. This was a foreseeable result of political decisions made by the elected officials of the city,” he lamented.

Whatever the solution is to rising violence, it’s hard to even have that debate unless we can spread the word about it. YouTube’s takedown of Kang’s videos makes it much harder to do that, and are adding insult to his literal injuries.

Update 5/17/2021: After we published this story, YouTube has appeared to soften its penalty against Kang and clarified the policy. They are not going to impose a strike on his channel and are moving the video to “locked as private,” meaning that other people cannot see the video. They are now claiming that it violates the “violent criminal organizations policy.”

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