YouTube has restored several video clips showing players of Red Dead Redemption 2 using their characters to beat suffragettes after initially deleting them.
The website took the gameplay recordings down on Wednesday and briefly banned the content creator behind them, saying they breached its rules on “acceptable content”.
But a spokesperson from YouTube has since claimed this was a mistake.
“YouTube’s Community Guidelines prohibit among other things, gratuitous violence, nudity, dangerous and illegal activities, and hate speech,” they said in a statement.
“Creative formats such as video games can be challenging to assess but when content crosses the line and is flagged to our attention, we take action as necessary.”
The company faced a backlash on social media after news of the initial ban broke.
In response Ryan Wyatt, YouTube’s head of gaming, tweeted: “The videos were re-reviewed, and we determined they should be age restricted, as they were not Community Guideline violations.
“The channel will be reinstated. All 8,000 videos will be rolled back to [the user’s] channel.”
In another tweet he added: “Sometimes we make mistakes, which is why we have multiple escalation paths for reviewers to raise tough decisions and we give creators the right to appeal. The reviewer will be educated on this outcome and on how to avoid repeating this mistake.”
One of the game footage videos, which showed the player’s character attacking a suffragette, attracted more than 1.5m views before it was deleted, with comments from users underneath supporting the content.
“Why can’t we do this in real life?,” one wrote.
The game is set in 1899, 20 years before the passage of the nineteenth amendment giving women the right to vote in the USA.
The original video appeared on user ’Shirrako’s content page, which had 473,000 subscribers at the time. The user was briefly suspended but has now been reactivated.