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YouTube has now issued a mea culpa for censoring speech during the pandemic at the behest of the Biden administration. The same people who lost their minds over Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension don’t seem to give two farts about this real First Amendment violation. The hypocrisy is astounding.
The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, to explain how they censored creators during COVID. The company’s answer? Basically: yeah, we did it… but we didn’t want to.
“Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the Covid-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies. While the Company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press the Company to remove non-violated user-generated content.”
In other words, the government leaned on Big Tech to erase legal speech. And YouTube complied.
THIS is government censorship in violation of the First Amendment. Jimmy Kimmel getting punished for making stuff up is not.
YouTube punished thousands of creators, including Senator Rand Paul, John Campbell, Kim Iversen, The Jimmy Dore Show — and us here at Redacted. What were the “violations”? Reporting true facts like the reality that masks don’t prevent infection and that vaccines don’t stop COVID transmission.
Redacted itself was slapped with two-week suspensions simply for reading Pfizer’s own clinical trial data out loud. YouTube locked us out of our channel, cut us off from viewers in the comments, and withheld revenue from ads they still ran on our videos. We never got an apology or repayment. And now they admit it.
YouTube says they won’t do this again and will reinstate some banned channels.
Do we forgive them? A bigger person would so…I’ll work on it.