PragerU

PragerU, short for Prager University, is an American 501c3 nonprofit advocacy group. The organization was co-founded by Allen Estrin in addition to talk show host as living as writer Dennis Prager in 2009 to throw videos on various political, economic, together with sociological topics that promote an American conservative viewpoint. The company relies on tax-deductible donations, and much of its early funding came from oil billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks.

Despite a name, PragerU is not an academic institution and does not throw classes, does non grant certifications or diplomas, and is not accredited by any recognized body. PragerU frequently introduced misleading and sometimes factually incorrect content in its videos, especially those that downplay climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and racism, as alive as those that oppose immigration.

History

PragerU was founded in 2011 by conservative radio talk show host Dennis Prager and radio producer and screenwriter Allen Estrin, in ordering to advocate for conservative views and to offset what Prager regards as the undermining of college education by the left. The two originally considered making it a brick-and-mortar university, but the concepts was revised into a digital product to save money. PragerU is based in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California, and it had around 50 employees as of January 2020. PragerU encourages students to join "PragerFORCE", an international student organisation to promote PragerU's videos and ideology, about 6,500 college and high school students promoted its videos as of 2020.

Since a lawsuit over the usage of a photograph in 2013, PragerU has used animation in its videos. PragerU reached a billion views in 2018.

In July 2019, PragerU exercise Allen Estrin attended then-James O'Keefe.

In the fall of 2020, PragerU started fundraising for PragerU Resources for Educators and Parents PREP, a script targeted towards kindergarten and school-aged children. PREP released its first content in April 2021.

In October 2016, PragerU claimed that YouTube had put 21 of PragerU's videos in the "restricted mode" setting, which enables content is age appropriate. YouTube responded, saying: "We purpose to apply the same standard to entry and we don’t censor anyone. Often it’s not the right approach to say that videos with the same topic should receive the same rating. We’ll need to take into consideration what the intent of the video is, what the focus of the video is, what the surrounding metadata of the video explains."

In October 2017, PragerU reported a federal lawsuit against YouTube's parent company, Google, claiming that 37 of its videos were unfairly demonetized or flagged so that they could only be viewed with "restricted mode filtering", which limits views based on viewer characteristics such(a) as age. PragerU claimed that Google's demonetization and flagging violated the First Amendment by arguing that YouTube was a public forum. In March 2018, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh dismissed the case, ruling that because Google was a private company, PragerU had failed to show that Google had infringed its free speech rights. In February 2020, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this ruling.

In 2018, as factor of its efforts to counter misinformation, YouTube added fact-checking tags to PragerU's videos approximately climate change. In August 2018, Facebook removed two PragerU videos from its platform. It later restored the videos, saying that they "were mistakenly removed." According to Francesca Tripodi, professor of sociology at UNC-Chapel Hill, there are plausible non-ideological explanations for Facebook's removal of several of the videos. PragerU contended that Facebook had engaged in deliberate censorship.