YouTube Excludes Pro-Life Tim Tebow Commercial on Super Bowl Ad Voting Site

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Feb 12, 2010   |   9:00AM   |   WASHINGTON, DC

YouTube Excludes Pro-Life Tim Tebow Commercial on Super Bowl Ad Voting Site

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 12
, 2010

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — More than 106 million people saw the pr-life Tim Tebow commercial on Super Bowl Sunday with an introduction to the story of Pam Tebow’s decision not to have an abortion when pregnant with him. While YouTube has the video of the ads, it appears to have excluded it from its Super Bowl Ad voting site.

YouTube created AdBlitz, a special section designed to let users of the popular video sharing web site vote on their favorite Super Bowl ads.

Dozens of commercials appear on three pages of the YouTube AdBlitz web site — except for the Tebow commercials.

Americans United for Life Action, the pro-life group that co-sponsored the popular Support Tim Tebow FaceBook page that garnered 270,000 fans of the Focus on the Family video noticed the omission.

"After looking at YouTube’s Ad Blitz page earlier today, we were able to see 72 separate Super Bowl ads. The Focus on the Family ad featuring Tim Tebow was not one of them," AUL informed LifeNews.com Friday afternoon.

"We aren’t sure whether the Tebow ad was ever included in the Ad Blitz site along with all the other Super Bowl ads, but it sure doesn’t appear to be there now. We repeatedly tried multiple methods of viewing or scrolling through the ads on that site. We also did a Google Search looking for any other coverage of this situation and found none," AUL noted.

YouTube appears to be alone in failing to include the Tebow ad as one commercial voters could support when ranking the Super Bowl ads.

AUL and LifeNews.com urged fans of the Tebow commercial to vote for it at Hulu and on USA Today’s ad voting and rankings page, both of which included the Tebow commercial.

"So, both Hulu and USA Today deemed the Tebow ad a legitimate ad for voting purposes. Apparently, YouTube found some reason to not include it on their Ad Blitz site," AUL said.

The exclusion could be a case of YouTube not having received an official contest entry from Focus on the Family, although LifeNews.com has not been able to confirm with Focus officials if they submitted their ads for the AdBlitz contest.

YouTube has caused frustration for pro-life advocates before on videos.

Last year, YouTube removed a new undercover video that exposes dishonest counseling practices at Planned Parenthood abortion centers. The new video showed a Planned Parenthood staff member telling pro-life activist Lila Rose that images of victims of abortion are "not real."

YouTube blocked a video in September 2008 exposing the racist donations Planned Parenthood accepted. YouTube provided no advance warning, but sent an email citing "an alleged privacy violation."

At the time, YouTube had also not responded to the group’s inquiry about why the first four videos critical of Planned Parenthood were marked as "content inappropriate."

In July 2008, a short film by the pro- life Population Research Institute highlighting dishonest reporting from a pro-choice filmmaker was censored.
YouTube eventually responded to criticism and restored both videos.

Also, YouTube took down a video from Citizens for a Pro-Life Society showing an abortion center that was investigated for illegally dumping medical waste.

No sooner had the video gone up of popular Hispanic actor Eduardo Verástegui denouncing presidential candidate Barack Obama on abortion than YouTube officials took it down. The video sharing site removed the full version of the video, which showed graphic images of abortions.

ACTION: Contact YouTube ask it to include the Tebow ad in its AdBlitz voting web site. YouTube, LLC, 901 Cherry Ave., San Bruno, CA 94066, USA (p) 650-253-0000, (f) 650-253-0001, [email protected]

Also, contact YouTube with your comments at https://www.youtube.com/t/contact_us

Related web sites:
Americans United for Life – https://www.aul.org

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