The royal family has become embroiled in a spat with YouTube after a video was published of the Duke of Cambridge yelling at a photographer.
The video, which was viewed more than 15,000 times on Monday, shows the Duke arguing with a photographer after being filmed on a bike ride with his family near Sandringham, Norfolk.
The Duke, 40, is seen yelling at a photographer, who he says was “stalking” his young family, but Kensington Palace responded by claiming it an invasion of family privacy. The visibly upset Duke is captured telling the photographer, “I thought you guys had learned by now.”
The short video was uploaded Monday, more than a year after the incident happened.
royal privacy
It underlines the major challenges facing the royal family in the online age, where rules followed by the traditional media do not apply.
Kensington Palace says the film is an invasion of privacy, with the Duke on a private bike ride with his wife and three children, who were present but blurred in the video.
It is clear that the staff wants to remove the video. On Monday, the three-minute video could still be seen on YouTube, a version of which is also circulating on TikTok.
The traditional British print media do not publish photos or videos of the royal family in private, and are particularly sensitive to images of Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis.
The duke who watched his mother’s experience with the paparazzi as a schoolboy spent years refining a scheme in which he authorizes a small number of pictures of the children each year in recognition of their future public role, while insisting on their total privacy the rest of the time.
But images of the children are regularly posted on social media and sold to European publications operating under various laws and press watchdogs.
The Duke was previously highly critical of social media companies and their approach to fake news, privacy issues and cyberbullying, accusing them of not take the problems seriously.
‘You are outrageous’
The latest video was shot in January 2021 near the home in Anmer Hall in Cambridge, where the Duke, Duchess and their three children were cycling down a country lane.
It shows the Duke confronting a photographer who claimed to have been in the area on a public road, looking only for Sandringham’s Saturday shot.
“You came looking for us,” the duke insisted. ‘How dare you behave as you have done to my children? How dare you?
“You’re walking around looking for us and… our children† I’m going on a quiet bike ride on Saturday with my kids. You don’t even want to give me your name.
“You’re outrageous, you’re disgusting, you really are. How dare you behave like that?”
Off-camera, the Duchess can be heard saying, “It’s the weekend with our kids. You drove past us outside our house, I saw you.”
The photographer denies being anywhere near the house, saying he kept to the public road and wasn’t hiding when he realized the family was cycling to him.
The duke, whose children were upset, was seen calling his security on the phone and refused to let the photographer walk away before police arrived to take his details.
“Thank you for ruining our day,” he said. “I thought you’d learned it by now.”
Kensington Palace asks for video removal
Obviously, Kensington Palace has asked for it to be removed from the platforms, in accordance with their usual privacy policy.
Employees have previously successfully appealed to: unauthorized photos of the children to take down.
The Duke has previously warned about the dangers of social media networks and what he saw as their executives’ unwillingness to address a range of issues affecting users.
“However, I am deeply concerned that our tech leaders appear to be on the back foot in every challenge they face — fake news, extremism, polarization, hate speech, trolling, mental health, privacy and bullying,” he said in 2018 .
“Their self-image is so rooted in their positive power for good that they seem unable to engage in constructive discussion about the social problems they create.”
A YouTube spokesperson has not yet responded.