MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador criticized YouTube on Sunday night after the technology company removed video of a news conference in which the leader revealed the phone number private of the New York Times bureau chief in Mexico.
The platform said the video had violated its policies on harassment and cyberbullying. He later republished an edited version without the journalist’s private information.
In response, López Obrador accused the platform of censorship and said that it acted with an arrogant and authoritarian attitude.
The message was accompanied by an image of the Statue of Liberty, which he said had become an “empty symbol.” YouTube did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Thursday, López Obrador read aloud a letter from the Times requesting comment on a story journalists were preparing about a shelved U.S. government investigation into allegations that its allies met with drug cartels and took millions from them. dollars after he took office in 2018.
Then he read the telephone number of the Times bureau chief. The same day, Mexico’s freedom of information body, INAI, said it was launching an investigation into the disclosure of the number.
After the press conference, the Times issued a statement calling it “a troubling and unacceptable tactic by a world leader.”
Making a journalist’s private phone number public is particularly worrying in Mexico, one of the most dangerous countries in the world for reporters outside of war zones, especially for Mexican journalists investigating criminal gangs and widespread corruption.
López Obrador frequently attacks the media during his daily press conferences.
“She is slandering us and if she is very worried, she should change her phone number,” López Obrador told reporters after the video was broadcast. “Above the personal data protection law, there is the dignity of the president.”
In the days that followed, social media users posted the private numbers of one of López Obrador’s children and both candidates for the country’s June presidential race, Claudia Sheinbaum of the president’s MORENA party and her rival Xochitl Gálvez.
Gálvez said he had received an avalanche of messages since his number was posted, both critical and supportive, and that he would not change it.
MORENA’s New York committee protested outside the Times office in New York City on Sunday afternoon.
The New York Times article in question, published just after López Obrador revealed the journalist’s phone number, noted that the United States never opened a formal investigation and that officials ultimately shelved the investigation.
López Obrador denied all the accusations and said they were “completely false.”
That story emerged on the heels of recent reports from other media outlets about a different U.S. investigation into possible collusion between a drug cartel and associates of López Obrador to accept money for his 2006 presidential campaign in exchange for leniency.
López Obrador has denied those accusations, calling them slander, and responded by saying that the journalist who published the story was a “mercenary in the service” of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, which carried out the investigation.
Concerns about media security have remained constant throughout López Obrador’s presidency. In January, the theft of personal data from hundreds of journalists in Mexico, including addresses and copies of voter ID cards and passports, raised new concerns.
The international freedom of expression organization Article 19 has documented 163 murders of journalists in Mexico since 2000.
(Reporting by Sarah Kinosian. Editing by Gerry Doyle)