In 2009, a nation of undocumented immigrants watched Barack Obama add a bold timetable to the completion of a comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) bill to be delivered from Congress to his desk and that he would be ready to sign. In an English-language interview filmed for Spanish-language primetime, Univision's Jorge Ramos backed President Obama into promising that an agreeable CIR bill would be drafted during the first year of his presidency.
Predictably, after 'la promesa de Obama' interview was broadcast on Univision, it immediately appeared on several YouTube channels; and 'la promesa de Obama' quickly migrated as a political term to South and, in particular, Central America where millions of relatives of undocumented immigrants living in the United States celebrated President Obama's promise on the most-defining policy issue in all of Latino affairs. A Fox News poll published last month shows that Latinos voters overwhelmingly support a DREAM Act and path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
President Obama's 2009 interview with Jorge Ramos on Univision's Al Punto program was and remains the most toxic moment the Obama Administration has had in Latino affairs. The political consequences of 'la promesa de Obama' on Capitol Hill were severe. Republicans in Congress immediately moved to corner the White House on Obama's promise to Latinos. Soon terms like "anchor baby" and "birthright citizenship" began to permeate the national debate on immigration reform as the Republican Party waged an absurd campaign of fear-mongering against the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to children born in the United States. In short, the message to the White House was clear: the Republican Party would venomously obstruct any inkling of immigration reform legislation that included path to citizenship for illegal immigrants living in the United States. Further, Republicans and the emerging block of "Blue Dog Democrats" in the Senate would redirect any discussion of meaningful immigration reform to an ordinary congressional horse trade for border security and broader immigration enforcement funding for political allies.
President Obama's 2009 interview with Jorge Ramos was not the first failure by Obama's Latino media team, but it was and remains the most-epic Hispanic media failure of Barack Obama's presidency. Strangely, the video has disappeared from YouTube, where I first saw it in 2010, via video search indices for queries it once dominated, like:
'la promesa de Obama' and 2009
'jorge ramos' obama interview 'al punto' 2009
I will have a comprehensive immigration reform bill from Congress that is ready to sign during my first year as president.
And so on. In fact, the only video available in the '2009' heading of the Al Punto collection of videos available on Univision's official YouTube channel is an interview posted on January 20, 2010 featuring interviews with Rep. Lincoln Díaz Balart (R-FL) and the great Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ). There is no trace of the Obama White House's most important Latino affairs moment: the promise that has been President Obama's poison in the stateside and international Spanish-language press. Indeed, the 'promesa de Obama' interview' has disappeared from YouTube.
3 Reasons YouTube Takes Down Videos
Corynne McSherry is Intellectual Property Director specializing in intellectual property and free speech issues at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). According to McSherry, there are three ways videos are forcibly removed from YouTube via one of the service provider's enforcement administrators. The first is pretty straight-forward: if YouTube finds the video violates the Terms of Service, platform administrators can remove the video.
The second reason videos get removed from YouTube is if a content owner finds their content posted without their authorization on someone else's YouTube Channel, they can appeal to YouTube to have the video removed via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. According to McSherry, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act states that if a service provider quickly takes down proprietary content upon notice of a violation from a copyright holder, the service provider is not liable for a copyright violation. In short, the law serves as a "safe harbor for service provider," McSherry says, and copyright holders must file a separate notice to YouTube for each video they seek to be removed from the platform for copyright violations.
The third way videos get removed from YouTube via platform administrators is algorithmically via YouTube's Content ID System. The system requires that a content owner provides a copy of the video and algorithm searches for matches that "identify user-uploaded videos comprised entirely OR partially of their content." If duplicate content is found to exist on unauthorized YouTube channels, the content owner is alerted. Users can protest removal of videos, but McSherry notes that "users find the procedure for disputing a Content ID Takedown confusing."
Why Did Univision Remove 'La Promesa De Obama' From YouTube?
As America knows, and particularly Americans who are fluent in Spanish know, President Obama broke his promise to Univision's Jorge Ramos, which ultimately was a promise to Latino voters. Again, the vast majority of Latinos voters support a DREAM Act and path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Unsurprisingly, the giants of network news in Spanish -- Univision and Telemundo -- both keep an editorial line that supports a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in the United States. Neither YouTube nor Univision could be reached with questions regarding why 'la promesa de Obama' video has vanished from YouTube's search indices, as well as its omission from the network news giant's YouTube Channel. Why Univision removed the most infamous Hispanic media moment of Barack Obama's presidency from all of YouTube remains for now a mystery.