According to an interview on April 5 with WeedTube Co-founder Arend Richard, creating cannabis video content is Chrissy Harless’s livelihood. “It is my [sole] income. It is my business. HarlessMediaGroupLLC. It is… the way that my husband is now at home working with us. How we are able to spend more time with our kids and have happier lives,” Harless said. “[YouTube is]Advertisement that promotes gambling, drugs, and alcohol. YouTube [is]They are allowed to accept money from advertisers in order to market it through ads. These are all regulated industries as well, but a content creator isn’t allowed to do the same? I don’t even glorify it. I don’t over consume. I’m very educational.” Harless’s usual content consisted of reviews and unboxing videos for various cannabis-related products.

Harless predicts that Harless’s channel will be deleted, and her family, as well as the numerous brands she collaborated with, will suffer. “Small businesses. Nearly all of them are small businesses. It could be an Etsy shop, or it could just be a mom and pop business. It’s a diverse group of small businesses just trying to share something safe.” Harless believes that the account termination may have been caused by linking to these companies and products, but she received no official explanation from YouTube.

Although her Instagram account was recently banned, it was restored to her possession after at least one month of hard work. When asked why she keeps trying, she replied that it’s just what she enjoys doing. “Because I have a passion for it, and I love it,” she explained. “It’s benefited my life and helped me find happiness in my life. This will also benefit other people, I’m sure. I know that other people do benefit from it.”

Harless mentioned that she’ll be moving to operate on WeedTube going forward. “I wish that a lot more people would rely on The WeedTube! For their views, for their content consumption of cannabis in general,” Harless said. “Because it is truly the only safe platform that you can share and not be concerned. Everybody on the platform is still accountable for it. [YouTube] making this a point is showing that there’s still so much of a stigma. They assume cannabis is harmful. It’s not. [YouTube and Google] don’t understand how safe this [cannabis] is.”

According to Richard, it’s the perfect platform to find an unlimited amount of cannabis video content. “What I can say for sure, is that WeedTube will always remain open to the cannabis community to post their content freely,” Richard concluded. “We were founded by deleted creators, for deleted creators. We never stopped serving that purpose, and we look forward to bringing the cannabis community even more functionality to combat all the censoring social media today.”

Four years ago, YouTube began to see a rise in account terminations for marijuana content. Account owners claimed that they received three strikes prior to their account being deleted. However, the exact timeframe for when an account would be officially deleted was unclear. In Harless’s case, she received no strikes at all prior to the account termination (although she does mention a strike that she received about two years ago).

WeedTube began a campaign to bring attention to cannabis censorship on Instagram in March, including a petition that requests Instagram leadership to “join a roundtable discussion with experts in the cannabis industry to update their policies and regulations around legal cannabis content to provide fair and equal opportunity to our rapidly growing industry.”