YouTube Pulls Sansad TV Account That Livestreamed Parliamentary Proceedings to ‘Fix Security Threats’

YouTube has temporarily terminated the official account of the government’s Sansad TV from its platform to fix security threats. The Sansad TV account was initially terminated by YouTube on account of “violating” its Community Guidelines. The video sharing service, however, later pulled the account altogether and started showing a 404 error, which is a standardised HTTP status code for unavailable webpages. Sansad TV revealed that the termination was an aftermath of a security incident that took place earlier on Tuesday. The Sansad TV account was used for livestreaming Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha proceedings. It also featured videos of the Prime Minister addressing the public and media.

Initially on Tuesday, the Sansad TV account was terminated for “violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.” The videos uploaded by the account were restricted due to the termination.

However, YouTube later pulled the account and made it unavailable. It started showing the ‘404 Not Found’ error on the site.

Sansad TV released a statement to announce that its YouTube account got compromised due to unauthorised activities by “some scamsters” and the name of the account was changed to “Ethereum”. The incident took place at 1am on Tuesday. It got restored by 3:45am by Sansad TV’s social media team, the television channel said.

The issue was alerted by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).

“YouTube has started fixing the security threats permanently and it shall be restored ASAP,” the channel said in the statement.

Sansad TV on YouTube is a verified account. It was originally named Rajya Sabha TV but renamed as Sansad TV last year — after the government merged Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha TV channels into Sansad TV.

According to the details available through an archived version of the account, Sansad TV on YouTube had over 6.32 million subscribers as of January 31. The account carried livestreams from both Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha proceedings as well as dedicated playlists for different sessions. The account also featured videos of the Vice President, Prime Minister, and Lok Sabha Speaker as well as a section to provide news and current affairs.