Youtube recently gave a two-week suspension to The Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN), a conservative news broadcaster, after they covered former President Donald Trump’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). His speech briefly touched on the Nov. 3 election and received nearly 4 million views before being censored by the Google-owned platform. It was removed from Youtube after violating references to voter fraud in the 2020 election within their community guidelines.
“RSBN has been suspended from YouTube for two weeks because of the Trump #CPAC2021 speech, which violated their guidelines on election misinformation. The video was approaching 4 million views. They have also removed it from their platform,” RSBN first posted on Twitter.
RSBN later told sources they could’ve avoided the suspension if they added “countervailing viewpoints” about election irregularities and criticized the CPAC speech. They said they weren’t going to remove or edit the video, and if it gets removed, it wasn’t done by them.
“Essentially we would have had to go on air and say everything Trump just said about election fraud is not true. We won’t censor President Trump or push back against things he says that, quite frankly, we agree with,” they said.
Uploads of the speech by former President Trump were deleting from other channels and mainstream media as well. Search results on YouTube garnered no evidence of his speech this year but allowed other videos that criticized the President or gave speeches at the 2021 convention.
Donald Trump Jr. also tweeted about the deletion of videos from his own account. He said it was that sort of “manipulation” and “interference” by Big Tech that shows how much weight these monopolies put on the scale of freedom. He added that “it’s never going to end” until we all band together to stop it.
YouTube also suspended the channel of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for the second time after he violated the platform’s policies in nicotine use and the election. A Youtube spokeswoman said in a statement that Giuliani’s channel was removed for violating their sale of the “regulated goods policy,” which prohibits content facilitating the use of nicotine, and the presidential election integrity policy.
Other media organizations such as The Independent also suffered censorship issues from Youtube after supposedly violating “nonpartisan” community guidelines. The Epoch Times was also demonetized by Youtube in late January without prior warning or a specific reason why.
“The founders of The Epoch Times are Chinese Americans who fled communist China and embraced their First Amendment rights here in the United States to create an independent and uncensored news organization. We believe that freedom of speech is the cornerstone of a free society and key for our republic to flourish,” The Epoch Times said in a statement.
Trump, himself, offered a warning to Big Tech companies for unchecked power and silencing conservative voices. He said all of the election integrity measures in the world “will mean nothing” if we don’t have free speech. “If Republicans can be censored for speaking the truth and calling out corruption, we will not have democracy and we will only have left-wing tyranny,” he said.
Youtube’s biased censorship of a former U.S President is evident enough that their blow to freedom of speech and expression is political. They have a history of creating policies to take out certain videos, creators, and viewpoints. They’ve already wiped out one of the largest pro-life channels on their platform and anyone who violates their COVID-19 “misinformation” policy.
What is Big Tech so afraid of? https://t.co/j6oUdSWr7F
— American Conservatives (@AmConservatives) March 5, 2021
