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Was YouTube Right to Censor and Allow Plagiarism of Katt Williams

Promoting a Condensed Version Dilutes the Message

William Spivey
3 min readJan 6, 2024
By MTV UK — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBX0KEMiZUk&t=32s, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94890675

I began hearing about the Katt Williams interview with Shannon Sharpe of Club Shay Shay long before I watched it. Social media rumors credited Williams with launching attacks on Rickey Smiley, Cedric the Entertainer, Kevin Hart, and Steve Harvey and catching a few strays like Tyler Perry, P Diddy, and Harvey Weinstein. Williams said he wasn't being messy if he was correcting lies. Maybe not, but he certainly did a good imitation.

I sought the video out yesterday afternoon and watched it throughout the day. The original video was 2 hours and 46 minutes long with almost 20 million views, so I gave it a few minutes and ended up watching the whole thing. When my wife came home, I tried looking it up on YouTube so we could watch it in bed. There it was, and I clicked on it, paying no attention to the length of the video. It turns out it was a condensed version, focusing on what someone determined were the "good parts." Who knows what criteria were used in deciding what…

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William Spivey
William Spivey

Written by William Spivey

I write about politics, history, education, and race. Follow me at williamfspivey.com and support me at https://ko-fi.com/williamfspivey0680

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