YouTube lifts restrictions on reed dance

YouTube has lifted restrictions from videos showing Swaziland's reed dance, which feature bare-breasted women. BBC News reports that the video-sharing platform said it allows nudity when ‘culturally relevant or properly contextualised’. Users who had uploaded reed dance videos were angered when it was classified as age-restricted content. YouTube has denied accusations of racism, saying it needed to be culturally sensitive. The move was in response to a campaign led by Lazi Dlamini, the head of TV Yabantu, an online video production company, featuring Africa's ‘finest culture... as seen, and recorded by the African people’. Its YouTube channel, which launched in 2016, had been adding up to 4 000 new subscribers every month until the platform started to flag its content as inappropriate.

Full BBC News report