It’s been more than 50 years since the Star Trek “sci-fi” franchise came to be, with a pretty revolutionary notion at the time of promoting a utopian take on our distant future: a world of justice, equity, and equality, where hardships of all sorts are eliminated and humans have nothing left to do but explore the universe and better themselves.
Well, admittedly – all this is happening several hundred years in the future from now in the Star Trek “universe” – so today, humanity is still expectedly very flawed.
Take the current owner of Star Trek, ViacomCBS. Its streaming platform, CBS All Access, has lately been trying to milk the franchise for all its worth, including a new series (“Discovery”) and several other projects, one of them being the “Lower Decks” animated series. And here the whole utopian narrative comes to a screeching halt – as CBS is accused of doing something very dystopian: censoring reactions to the series trailer posted by reviewers on YouTube.
And what better way to block critics than to issue false copyright blocks, right? At least that’s what appears to be happening to YouTubers like Grace Randolph and That Star Wars Girl who said on Twitter that CBS All Access “blocked (the reaction video) worldwide.”
That Star Trek Girl claims that her use of the copyrighted material falls under the fair use rule and that YouTube blocked it on behalf of CBS just after it was uploaded, but before it was even published.
Some Twitter users who commented on this development wondered how blocking and restricting information about a new project might be considered a good way to promote it.
The trailer has just been released, and another way that the network has gone about controlling the message about this latest incarnation of Star Trek has been to disable comments and dislikes after receiving negative feedback. As if that somehow makes it all go away.
This kind of reaction has been widespread among those dissatisfied with the direction the once-beloved franchise has been taking for a while now – with the new animated series apparently leaving much to be desired all the way to ViacomCBS rumored to be looking for ways to improve it before the episodes officially air.
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