Google-owned YouTube has stripped the Epoch Times of its ability to monetize content on the platform, giving only vague reasons as to why.

“YouTube demonetized the Epoch Times and related accounts last week,” said Stephen Gregory, publisher of the Epoch Times. “This is the latest example of big tech suppression of free speech, a step on the road to communist-style censorship.”

A YouTube spokeswoman told Breitbart News the following:

We have demonetized The Epoch Times’ YouTube channel and affiliated channels and suspended them from the YouTube Partner Program. All channels on YouTube need to comply with our Community Guidelines and in order to monetize, channels must comply with the YouTube Partner Program policies, which include our Advertiser-Friendly Guidelines. Channels that repeatedly violate these policies are suspended from our partner program.

But YouTube did not identify which video(s) from the Epoch Times violated the platform’s policies.

The Epoch Times is a widely-read and well-established international media publication. Its properties include its flagship print newspaper, available in many major cities around the world.

Competing media companies have falsely accused the newspaper of being “far right,” due to its neutral-to-favorable coverage of President Trump and other populist politicians and political movements around the world. It has previously been censored by Facebook. 

Yet the newspaper’s main editorial position — criticism of the Communist Party of China and its growing international influence — is neither right-wing nor left-wing.

Google, which owns YouTube, has often faced criticism for its ties to China. In 2018, following bipartisan outcry, the tech giant was forced to cancel “Project Dragonfly,” an ongoing project to develop a search engine aimed at the Chinese market that censored search terms that were deemed problematic to the Communist government.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.