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YouTube CEO Neal Mohan Says YouTube is a “Bastion of Free Speech”

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | January 6, 2025

If you believe Neil Mohan, YouTube’s CEO, the platform is a modern-day Agora—a self-described “bastion of free speech” where the world’s most pressing debates thrive. Though, “just because it’s an open platform, it doesn’t mean that anything goes,” Mohan told The Financial Times in the last week. Translation: Free speech is alive and well—until it isn’t. Because on YouTube, the marketplace of ideas comes with a bouncer, a velvet rope, and an ever-expanding list of banned words and topics.

This month, YouTube is eager to remind everyone it’s “committed” to free expression, a sentiment as convincing as a fast-food chain promising “health-conscious dining.” Over the last five years, the platform has turbocharged its content moderation policies, leaning on AI overlords and human censors to police conversations ranging from vaccine skepticism to who gets to call a virus a “lab leak.”

It’s a delicate balance, they claim—one requiring the finesse of a trapeze artist. But if the past is any guide, the only thing YouTube’s balancing act reliably delivers is corporate doublespeak and a pile of censored creators.

Moderation or Muting?

Mohan, the relatively new captain of YouTube’s Titanic, insists that the company welcomes “broad views” but won’t tolerate “anything goes.” Consider their “community guidelines,” a vague, shape-shifting set of rules that could find your grandma’s knitting tutorial in violation if it dares question Big Pharma.

Behind this rhetoric is an algorithmic enforcement machine programmed to flag, demonetize, or outright remove content at lightning speed—accuracy be damned. And when the AI overlords fumble, the human moderators step in, wielding their own biases like blunt instruments.

Critics, including banned creators, point out that YouTube’s moderation seems to skew conveniently in one direction. Questioning the CDC? Misinformation. Broadcasting claims about ivermectin? Censored. But when a mainstream outlet gets caught peddling unverified or downright wrong information, it’s business as usual.

The COVID-19 Information Iron Curtain

Of course, nothing showcases YouTube’s free speech schizophrenia better than its pandemic policies. To combat “medical misinformation,” the platform instituted a strict purge of dissenting voices, silencing everyone from epidemiologists to concerned moms armed with anecdotal evidence and Facebook memes.

Let’s not forget the lab leak theory, a hypothesis once relegated to tinfoil hat territory. When early adopters of the theory dared to post about it, their content was struck down faster than you could say “gain-of-function research.” Fast forward a couple of years and the lab-leak theory is now a “credible hypothesis,” endorsed by experts and even government agencies.

Oops.

But don’t expect an apology or even acknowledgment from YouTube for playing arbiter of acceptable science. They’ve quietly updated policies and moved on, leaving censored creators wondering why their “misinformation” turned out to be, well, information.

Advertiser-Friendly Speech Only

The real driver of YouTube’s overzealous content policing, of course, is money. Back in 2017, a wave of advertiser boycotts over “hateful” and “controversial” content sent the platform scrambling. The solution? Stricter guidelines are needed to ensure that only the most sanitized, brand-safe content remains.

While no one would argue against booting child exploitation, the crackdown didn’t stop there. It extended into politically sensitive areas, conveniently targeting independent creators and smaller voices while leaving corporate media to do as they pleased.

What’s worse is the blatant double standard. Want to critique vaccine mandates or discuss alternative COVID treatments? Good luck. But if you’re a major network spouting unverified claims about weapons of mass destruction or “imminent threats,” go right ahead. After all, those ad dollars won’t chase themselves.

YouTube’s Legacy of Censorship

Mohan’s lofty rhetoric about fostering “broad views” might play well in interviews, but the reality on the ground is clear: YouTube’s commitment to free speech is as reliable as a politician’s campaign promise. The platform has repeatedly chosen corporate image over open discourse, advertisers over authenticity, and control over community.

And yet, it continues to parade as a defender of free expression. Perhaps Mohan and his team truly believe in their own doublespeak. Or maybe they’re banking on the fact that most users will never notice the glaring contradictions. Either way, YouTube’s hypocrisy isn’t an accident—it’s a business model.

The next time you hear Neil Mohan wax poetic about “free speech,” remember this: On YouTube, freedom comes with conditions, and the only real winners are the ones writing the checks.

January 7, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 1 Comment

Fearful of the Public, Western Leaders Turn to Censorship

By Ian DeMartino – Sputnik – 07.10.2024

On Saturday, former US First Lady Hillary Clinton called for increased federal regulation of the internet and repealing Section 230. “If the platforms… don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control,” she said, raising the question of who “we” represents in that statement.

From the recent purge of YouTube accounts, including those from Mark Sleboda, Rachel Blevins, Glenn Diesen, DD Geopolitics, Fiorella Isabel, Larry Johnson, and Eva K. Bartlett, it is clear that the Western leaders are scared of their populations finding out the truth about their policies and actions.

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people,” Former US President John F. Kennedy.

“That’s what they’re afraid of,” Sleboda, an expert in geopolitical relations and a frequent guest on Sputnik Radio, told The Final Countdown. “They don’t trust you to hear an alternate view from the official US government narrative and come to what they consider the right political conclusions.”

Many Americans were taught that freedom was proof-positive that Western-style democracies were superior to other systems.

In separate interviews, Sleboda and Blevins both said that their channels were taken down without warning or strikes. Both were accused of violating YouTube’s policies on hate speech and said their appeals were denied within minutes.

“Just anyone who is critical of a US foreign policy, of hegemony, has had their YouTube channels deleted,” Sleboda contended.

While the censorship technically came from Alphabet, the mega-monolith tech company that owns both Google and YouTube, a comprehensive program between the US government and large social media companies has slowly been revealed over the past couple of years making the line one without distinction.

“My lawyer called that First Amendment censorship via proxy, or government censorship via proxy,” Political cartoonist and The Final Countdown co-host Ted Rall explained. “The US government has reached out to big tech companies, talked to people like [Meta CEO] Mark Zuckerberg and so on, and said, ‘we want you to control and squish what we call misinformation and disinformation.’”

With the internet practically ubiquitous in modern society, an expansion of the First Amendment to public and private sectors of the internet is needed to protect our speech rights.

“What does the First Amendment actually mean in today’s age when just about everyone is on social media or on the internet in some way, and it has become sort of the new public square?” asked Blevins, an independent journalist, and host of The Backstory on Radio Sputnik. “What are we okay with when it comes to the ongoing censorship? Because I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon.”

Even if the government were removed from the equation, and censorship came exclusively from the tech companies themselves they have become so powerful that acts of self-censorship would be indistinguishable from government-ordered censorship, especially during wartime.

In post-9/11 America, large media companies kept dissenting voices off the air, limiting the reach of those who, for example, opposed the war in Iraq.

“And you get that corporate mentality of what will the advertisers think?” legendary Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson argued in an August 2002 interview with Media Report.

“A kind of we’re all in this together thinking.” The consolidation of the internet from disparate groups of message boards and newsgroups into a handful of omnipresent tech companies raises that specter again.

“As we saw this weekend, YouTube can come in and just delete your channel and take your life’s work away from you,” decried Blevin, noting that her channel was backed up on the free speech platform Rumble.

The majority of the deleted accounts offered views that opposed the NATO-led proxy war in Ukraine and/or Western support of Israel. As the war drums beat ever louder in Europe, the Middle East, and the South Pacific, not to mention the US Presidential election next month, the crackdown is likely to increase.

“They haven’t really thrown out the term election interference just yet, but I have a feeling that’s coming in some way,” warned Blevins.

“We’ll tell our grandchildren about the golden age of a global internet,” before censorship took it over, predicted Sleboda. “I think we’re going to see our internet fractured into either individual states’ internets or geopolitical block’s internets. And I think the process has already begun,” he warned.

October 7, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | 1 Comment

Facebook Gave CDC ‘Backdoor’ Access to Help Remove Millions of Social Media Posts

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 30, 2024

Facebook provided the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “backdoor” access to its platform so the CDC could submit requests to remove COVID-19 “misinformation,” according to an internal Facebook document made public for the first time as part of an ongoing legal case.

America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2021, after then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki revealed the Biden administration was flagging purported “disinformation” on social media platforms, including content posted by members of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen.”

When the Biden administration didn’t comply with the FOIA request, America First Legal sued, leading to the release of the documents as part of the discovery process.

According to Reclaim the Net, in 2021, Facebook developed a “Content Request System” (see pages 54-72) — also called a “Government Reporting System” — accessible to CDC staff. The documents show Facebook “was operating as the de facto enforcement arm of the US government’s thought control initiative.”

The Facebook-CDC partnership helped Facebook remove millions of posts, the documents show.

Gene Hamilton, executive director of America First Legal, told The Defender, “These documents show precisely how one of the social media platforms facilitated the federal government’s engagement in unconstitutional censorship activities.”

“The federal government cannot violate the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to the private sector, yet these documents clearly show that Facebook and the Biden-Harris administration collaborated and colluded on removing speech that did not comport with the federal government’s preferences,” Hamilton said.

Tim Hinchliffe, editor of The Sociable, told The Defender that following the release of the “Twitter Files,” it should not come as a surprise “that the government has been actively trying to censor citizens through back doors and loopholes.”

“This censorship effort is yet another example of a public-private collaboration that fuses corporation and state,” Hinchliffe said. “Where the government can’t legally censor, it has the private sector to do its bidding. The question here is how much coercion was needed for Facebook to provide the backdoor?”

These latest revelations come as other entities ramp up their own efforts to target purported “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

On Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) and TikTok announced a new partnership to promote “science-based information.” Meanwhile, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a Big Pharma lobbying group, this month urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to “expand drug manufacturers’ powers to correct misinformation about their products.”

‘Red-carpet treatment’ for government to ‘silence critics and manage dissent’

Calling it a “fast lane for speech suppression,” Reclaim the Net reported that Facebook “built a slick ‘end-to-end workflow’ tailored to the White House’s censorship needs,” which provided CDC staff with a four-step process to flag COVID-19 “misinformation” for removal.

“This was the red-carpet treatment for anyone in the Biden Administration looking to silence critics and manage dissent,” Reclaim the Net reported. “The system could handle up to twenty censorship requests simultaneously.”

The Facebook document stated, “We empower and safeguard users with policies that are: Principled, Operable, Explicable.” These policies were aligned with Facebook’s “community standards” and adopted “a multi-pronged approach to combating COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation.”

The policies — aimed at “bringing 50 million people a step closer to vaccinations” — included the removal of “false information that has been debunked by public health experts.”

Other types of content Facebook explicitly targeted include claims that COVID-19 is no more dangerous to people than the common flu or cold, and content discouraging “good health practices” — such as wearing a face mask, social distancing, getting tested for COVID-19 and getting vaccinated against COVID-19.

Claims about the COVID-19 vaccines’ safety, side effects and efficacy also were targeted for removal, as were “widely debunked vaccine hoaxes” — including claims that vaccines cause autism.

The document also revealed that as of 2021, Facebook and Instagram had removed “more than 16 million pieces of content … for violating our COVID-19 and vaccine policies.”

Repeat offenders faced restrictions, including (but not limited to) reduced distribution, removal from recommendations, or “removal from our site.”

The platform also allowed government officials to bypass federal transparency laws.

“By using this specialized portal, and not email, the government could skirt those pesky federal record-keeping laws. FOIA requests? Public oversight? Forget about it. The new system made sure government actions were neatly tucked away in proprietary software,” Reclaim the Net reported.

‘The closest thing to a Ministry of Truth’

According to Reclaim the Net, Robert Flaherty, then-White House director of Digital Strategy and now a member of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, was “barking orders at Facebook to tighten the leash.”

“Twitter Files” documents have shown that Flaherty pressured social media platforms to censor the accounts of public figures such Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then-chairman and chief litigation counsel of Children’s Health Defense (now chairman on leave). Kennedy was one of the figures named in “The Disinformation Dozen” report.

“The bureaucratic whims of entrenched CDC personnel and leadership determined what Americans could and could not say — the closest thing to a Ministry of Truth you can imagine in the United States,” Hamilton said.

Author Naomi Wolf, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of DailyClout, told The Defender, “This shocking new revelation of still more unlawful pressure by the U.S. government on social media companies to strip Americans of First Amendment rights, also fails to shock as it is evidence added to a mountain of documentation of such collusion.”

According to Hamilton, these and other documents may affect several ongoing lawsuits against the Biden administration on First Amendment grounds.

“As more records are uncovered through our lawsuit and other open records requests, as well as discovery in litigation, we are confident that courts will have the definitive links necessary to show the government’s facilitation of an unconstitutional censorship enterprise,” Hamilton said.

The latest revelations came just a month after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta — parent company of Facebook and Instagram — admitted that Biden administration officials pressured Meta to censor content related to COVID-19 during the pandemic.

“If the government can exert that much pressure on one of the largest platforms and its CEO, then it can do it to anybody,” Hinchliffe said.

In an interview earlier this month on “The Kim Iversen Show,” former U.S. State Department official Mike Benz, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said the U.S. government coerced social media platforms to use “weapons of mass deletion” to censor content and as a workaround to the First Amendment.

According to Benz, this includes government coercion obliging these platforms to adopt automated censorship tools which employ artificial intelligence to sweep platforms for specific keywords or narratives. Benz said many of these tools were initially developed a decade ago for the fight against ISIS.

Benz said the U.S. government urged authorities in the United Kingdom and European Union (EU) to pass censorship laws, in order to then sidestep the First Amendment at home by obliging social media platforms to comply with more restrictive foreign laws.

Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst told The Defender the EU uses legislation such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) “to stop free speech outside EU borders.”

“According to the EU, the DSA prevents illegal and harmful activities online and protects fundamental rights,” Terhorst said. This means that the EU Commission can decide what is right and what is wrong, including ‘harmful disinformation.’”

TikTok ‘a propaganda arm’ of the United Nations?

TikTok and the WHO on Sept. 26 announced a new collaboration targeting health-related “misinformation.” The year-long partnership is “aimed at providing people with reliable, science-based health information.”

According to the WHO, the new collaboration will promote “evidence-based content and encourage positive health dialogues.”

The WHO quoted Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar, who said, “This collaboration can prove to be an inflection point in how platforms can be more socially-responsible.”

Farrar collaborated with Dr. Anthony Fauci and key virologists to draft “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published March 2020 in Nature Medicine. The paper has been used by media and the U.S. government to debunk the lab-leak theory of the COVID-19 outbreak and accuse its proponents of being “conspiracy theorists.”

According to public health physician Dr. David Bell, partnerships like the one between the WHO and TikTok are inappropriate. He told The Defender :

“WHO, as an organization subject to member states and with no direct standing over their citizens, should not be involved in such direct messaging. This is a clear infringement of the rights, role and sovereignty of the states themselves.

“WHO acts increasingly like a tool of colonialist corporate interests as it pushes their messages over the top of legitimate authorities and interferes in the running of health systems within countries.”

According to Hinchliffe, this is not the first TikTok partnership with the United Nations (U.N.). As part of a previous project, Team Halo, “the U.N. trained scientists and doctors on TikTok and worked with TikTok to boost their profiles in an effort to combat ‘misinformation’ while promoting ‘authoritative sources’ during the pandemic.”

“This latest partnership shows that TikTok is honored to once again be a propaganda arm for the U.N.,” Hinchliffe said.

The WHO previously established similar partnerships with other social media platforms, including YouTube, which last year revised its “medical misinformation” policy to allow for the deletion of content that contradicts WHO guidance.

The announcement of the TikTok partnership with the WHO — a U.N. agency — comes just days after U.N. member states passed the Pact for the Future.

The pact’s “Information Integrity on Digital Platforms” policy brief addresses “threats to information integrity,” such as so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation,” calling for the promotion of “empirically-backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge” — without clarifying how this “consensus” would be determined.

The TikTok partnership with the WHO also comes before the January 2025 legislative deadline for TikTok to divest its U.S. operations or face shutdown in the U.S.

Pharma wants expanded powers to ‘correct misinformation’

In another related development lobbyists for Big Pharma earlier this month asked the FDA “to expand drug manufacturers’ powers to correct misinformation about their products, including by allowing them to respond to opinions, value judgments or personal experiences and communications made offline,” Fierce Pharma reported.

The call was a response to the FDA’s draft guidance on “Addressing Misinformation About Medical Devices and Prescription Drugs.” Released in July and now open for public comment, the guidance would allow pharmaceutical companies to issue “tailored” responses to internet-based posts about their products, and “general medical product communications” that would address “misinformation.”

According to Fierce Pharma, “The FDA proposed prohibiting companies from posting tailored responsive communications in response to misinformation spread offline and in response to an individual’s posts about their own experience, opinion and value judgments. PhRMA wants the FDA to lift those restrictions.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

September 30, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Social media platforms block Iran’s Al-Alam accounts over coverage of Gaza war

Press TV – March 5, 2024

In a new attack against freedom of expression, a number of American social media platforms have blocked the accounts of the Iranian Arabic-language news network Al-Alam without prior notice.

Al-Alam reported on Tuesday that video-sharing website YouTube, social media giants X and Instagram have blocked its pages and accounts over the network’s support for Gaza and publishing news related to the Israeli regime’s attacks on the besieged Palestinian territory.

The latest moves prove that CEOs of American social media giants, despite their claims about freedom of speech and human rights, do not allow the publication of facts, Al-Alam said in a statement.

These social media platforms are trying to cover up the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians by disabling the accounts of networks that reflect the occupying regime’s war crimes in Gaza.

The Arabic-language news network said it will continue to support the oppressed people of Palestine and reflect the reality on the ground by creating new pages.

This is not the first time that YouTube and other social medial platforms have deleted Al-Alam accounts or pages without any prior notice or justification.

Back in March 2022 and in a similar move, Facebook “permanently” removed the page of Al-Alam TV from its platform despite the fact that the network’s Facebook page had some 6,000,000 followers at the time.

Facebook claimed the Tehran-based network had not complied with its terms regarding the publication of photos of the flags and the leaders of Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, Yemen’s Ansarullah and Palestinian resistance groups.

Over the past years, Facebook — along with YouTube, X (formerly known as Twitter) and Google — have repeatedly targeted media outlets of Iran and the countries critical of the West and the Israeli regime’s occupation of Palestine.

March 6, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Google Experiments With “Faster and More Adaptable” Censorship of “Harmful” Content Ahead of 2024 US Elections

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 20, 2023

In the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election, Big Tech engaged in unprecedented levels of election censorship, most notably by censoring the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story just a few weeks before voters went to the polls.

And with the 2024 US presidential election less than a year away, both Google and its video sharing platform, YouTube, have confirmed that they plan to censor content they deem to be “harmful” in the run-up to the election.

In its announcement, Google noted that it already censors content that it deems to be “manipulated media” or “hate and harassment” — two broad, subjective terms that have been used by tech giants to justify mass censorship.

However, ahead of 2024, the tech giant has started using large language models (LLMs) to experiment with “building faster and more adaptable” censorship systems that will allow it to “take action even more quickly when new threats emerge.”

Google will also be censoring election-related responses in Bard (its generative AI chatbot) and Search Generative Experience (its generative AI search results).

In addition to these censorship measures, Google will be continuing its long-standing practice of artificially boosting content that it deems to be “authoritative” in Google Search and Google News. While this tactic doesn’t result in the removal of content, it can result in disfavored narratives being suppressed and drowned out by these so-called authoritative sources, which are mostly pre-selected legacy media outlets.

Like Google, YouTube confirmed that it will enforce its existing censorship policies ahead of the 2024 elections, including those that apply to election “misinformation” and “harmful conspiracy theories.” These policies resulted in the censorship of tens of thousands of videos and many popular channels in the buildup to and aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.

The video sharing platform will also boost videos from authoritative sources — a policy that resulted in independent creators being 14x less likely to be recommended on election-related content after the 2020 elections.

Additionally, YouTube will demonetize videos that it deems to contain “demonstrably false claims that could undermine trust or participation in elections.”

Outside of these direct censorship tactics, YouTube will label “altered or synthetic election content” that doesn’t violate any of its rules. Although these labels won’t result in content suppression, similar labels on other platforms have confused users and resulted in them believing that real but selectively edited videos are fake. Plus, legacy media outlets often use these labels to bolster their censorship demands.

Collectively, these announcements from Google and YouTube signal an intention to supercharge the mass censorship playbook that was deployed during the 2020 election and resulted in a two-tiered system where independent creators that dared to have dissenting or alternative opinions about the election were censored while legacy media outlets had their election narrative boosted across Google’s platforms.

Related: 

How Big Tech Normalized the Censorship of the President

December 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

YouTube Boasts About Elevating “Quality” Content, Collaborating With the WHO, and Suppressing “Misinformation”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | November 15, 2023

YouTube (Google) is yet another in a series of tech behemoths that feel the need to declare their stance on content, including its effective algorithmic manipulation, just as US primaries are ushering the country into another year of presidential elections.

Beating around that bush – Google representatives now talk about processes, procedures, and tools of censorship of health-related information that, unfortunately, can easily be “repurposed” to serve other, for example, political ends.

Much of the conversation rests on what Google wants to portray as its laurels from “the previous epidemic” – which too many people and creators see from a diametrically opposed point of view, as a dark time of nearly unbridled censorship and suppression of free speech.

A video now published by Yahoo Finance reveals not only that Google has a “chief clinical officer,” but also how that officer, Michael Howell, sees the role of this super powerful tech corporation in determining what users are likely to see, see first, or see at all on a platform like YouTube.

Howell, naturally, sees nothing wrong with this and even, to all intents and purposes, brags that YouTube is working to make sure legacy media have advantage over independent creators, and that the latter may easily face censorship.

That’s the takeaway from his words, which he chose to phrase thus: YouTube works to “lift up high quality content, even as we work to lower, and make less prominent content that isn’t accurate or helpful to users.”

The whole interview is positioned as an exploration of how “misinformation grows and spreads” supposedly in sync with the amount of content and the number of users. There is even the assertion made by Yahoo that medical sector “misinformation” is not only very present among users but also “in the broader medical community.”

While this may or may not signal continued censorship of “disfavored” medical professionals, YouTube Head of Healthcare & Public Health (yes, that’s a YouTube job title these days, too) Dr. Garth Graham shared that the platform is the first to start “labeling health information that’s coming from licensed doctors, licensed nurses, licensed healthcare professionals.”

And even after all these years of sometimes completely arbitrary censorship YouTube is supposed to be taken as a “credible source of information (users) can trust” – as it works with the National Academy of Medicine and of course, the World Health Organization (WHO) to craft its definitions, and then “raise that up” – i.e., algorithmically promote, at the expense of other content.

Graham had more curious things to say, such as that while clearly committed to censoring what (or, whatever) Google decides is “delicate (sic) and dangerous information” – people are still supposed to view it as an “open platform”!

Either Graham doesn’t know what an open platform is, or he hopes YouTube/Google users don’t.

There’s also a good amount of patronizing toward those users, as in them needing to be hand-held (by Google) pretty much all the way in order to discern information from misinformation and make appropriate decisions.

“So, you know, we’re an open platform, but the real goal is how do you balance getting good information to people at the right time (…) while making sure that we remove delicate or dangerous information.”

Asked how Google has already managed (shocker) to get the government to participate in posting videos promoting their policies and what “conversations” preceded this, the Google exec said that “the entire healthcare eco-system” was already “energized” to get their message across.

And he counted the government as well as hospitals and physicians as part of this eco-system. One of them, last but not least, is the WHO.

What we know for certain from a great number of internal documents that have emerged over the past months both from Twitter and Facebook is that these two were being “led” to do certain things by the government and its agencies.

Google’s position in the interview is suggested to be the opposite – namely, at one point Howell is asked if the company basically instructed all these national and international healthcare players on what content to make, and have “trending” (mostly artificially, one might add.)

Howell dances around this question – or statement – by saying that the (pandemic) produced a community of creators from the health sector.

But as we know, many of them also got their voices silenced, however, that is not something anyone should expect Google to address.

Instead, the talk is obviously about the “approved” community of healthcare creators.

But, says Howell: “If there’s no good content out there that people want to watch, it’s very hard to show (that) content to users.”

And, cynics would say – then you write an algorithm that shoves that content into everybody’s “recommended” videos anyway.

But, Howell decided to claim that “people responded well to YouTube’s partnerships” – where that last word means, government and international bodies and institutions.

November 15, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | 1 Comment

Israel targets journalists, kills their families as Big Tech & Biden admin silence Palestinians

BY WYATT REED · THE GRAYZONE · OCTOBER 27, 2023

With Israeli airstrikes on Gaza killing at least twenty Palestinian journalists—and the Biden administration working to muzzle others—Big Tech is quietly coordinating with Tel Aviv to muzzle Palestinian media outfits.

Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip killed three Palestinian journalists on October 25 in one of the deadliest days for local reporters since the military’s bombing campaign began nearly three weeks before. As the hours passed, footage appeared showing the moment Ramallah-based journalist Mohammed Farra learned that his wife and children were all killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza’s Khan Younes neighborhood.

Similarly heart-rending scenes would play out more than once over the course of the day. Elsewhere in the besieged coastal enclave, an Israeli airstrike killed the wife, son, daughter and infant grandson of Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh.

Israel’s attacks on Palestinian journalists came hours after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured “American Jewish community leaders” that he urged Qatar’s government “to tone down Al Jazeera’s rhetoric about the war in Gaza” during a recent trip to Doha.

Suspicions that Israeli forces deliberately targeted Dahdouh’s family were quickly bolstered by comments from News 13 journalist Zvi Yehezkeli.

“Generally we know the target,” Yehezkeli told audiences within hours of the strike, adding, “for example, today there was a target: the family of an Al Jazeera reporter.”

“In general, we know,” he concluded.

If true, it wouldn’t be the first time the Dahdouh’s outlet found itself in Israeli crosshairs. In 2021, the Israeli military leveled the Gaza tower that housed the officers of both the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The following year, Israeli forces assassinated renowned Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, a veteran Jerusalem-based correspondent for Al Jazeera, in a shooting that drew international condemnation but was largely ignored by the US government, which echoes the Israeli government’s position that her killing was “unintentional.” Under Blinken, the State Department has distanced itself from its initial expressions of outrage and no longer calls for either an independent investigation or criminal charges for the perpetrators.

Big Tech censorship targets Palestinian journalists after Israel targets their homes

As the US and Israel rush to censor the voice of Palestinian journalists, Big Tech censorship has proven indispensable to Israel’s propaganda war. In the aftermath of October 7, multiple social media platforms have suspended or deactivated profiles belonging to numerous prominent journalists, human rights advocates, and Palestinian activists. The crackdown follows years of complaints alleging double standards when it comes to anti-Zionist content on social media.

Accounts operated by Eye On Palestine disappeared from Instagram, Facebook, and X on October 25, leaving more than 6 million followers unable to access one of the most popular resources providing firsthand footage of destruction in Gaza. A spokesman for Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, insisted the suspensions were not politically motivated, asserting “We did not disable these accounts because of any content they were sharing.”

Despite Meta’s denial, it is worth recalling the company’s record of complying with Israeli government censorship requests. Following the approval of a so-called “Facebook Bill” aimed at clamping down on digital “incitement” in 2016, fanatical former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked bragged that Facebook, Twitter and Google were complying with 70 percent of their takedown orders.

Tamer Al Mishal, a Palestinian journalist who has served as a crucial Gaza-based news source for many years, put a face to that statistic. In September, Al Mishal made waves when he published an exposé on Al Jazeera illustrating how Meta coordinated with Israeli intelligence to stifle pro-Palestinian content. When he attempted to access his social media profile days later, the reporter made an alarming discovery: his Facebook page had completely ceased to exist.

He wasn’t the only one. The week before, Meta suspended the Instagram account of Palestinian influencer and photojournalist Motaz Azaiza after he shared footage of the remnants of his apartment building, where 15 of his family members were killed in an Israeli airstrikes.

“Palestinian journalists in Gaza are not just facing the Israeli occupation,” Shadi Abdelrahman, a local reporter with years of experience covering events in Gaza from the ground, explained to The Grayzone. “They also have to overcome a lot of censorship by Facebook, YouTube,” he told The Grayzone, adding: “anything on social media, they need to be very careful because they will get their accounts banned.”

“Working as a journalist in Gaza is not an easy job,” he says, not only “because you are being censored by social media, [but] also it can cause problems with Israeli authorities, especially if you’d like to leave through any crossing which is controlled by Israel.”

If you’re outspoken in your coverage, Abdelrahman says, Israeli authorities “will consider you as an enemy.”

During 2021’s Great March of Return, “those journalists who were attending the weekly marches and covering it were targeted deliberately by Israel.”

“Some of them were shot in the knees, some of them were shot in the legs. Some of them got killed,” Abdelrahman recalled.

On Instagram, meanwhile, users noted an apparent ‘glitch’ temporarily translated the Arabic word for “Palestinian” into “Palestinian terrorist.”

During an October 26 raid in Jenin, the Israeli army destroyed the memorial to Shireen Abu Akleh, the renowned Al Jazeera correspondent it killed there a year before.

October 28, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture, Video, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

YouTube Greatly Expands Its Medical “Misinformation” Policies

New rules, largely determined by the WHO

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | August 16, 2023

YouTube, the titan of online video content, has expanded its Covid misinformation policy to cover what it calls all forms of medical misinformation.

YouTube has also declared its plan to delist videos promoting “cancer treatments proven to be harmful or ineffective,” effectively disallowing content creators from encouraging natural cures.

The platform pledges to implement its medical misinformation policies when a topic exhibits high public health risks, is supposedly prone to misinformation, and when official guidance from health authorities is accessible to the public.

The changes also see YouTube recommitting to groups such as the WHO and other health bodies on what information is deemed to be acceptable for people to talk about on the platform – despite these institutions having recently received major blows to their credibility.

According to the policy update, YouTube will no longer host content that:

  • Misinforms about prevention techniques or contradicts current health authority guidelines, including inaccuracies regarding the safety or efficacy of approved vaccines.
  • Promotes treatments that local health bodies or the WHO have neither approved nor recognized as safe and effective. Moreover, it bans content that advocates for harmful substances or practices that have been scientifically proven to be detrimental.
  • Denies the existence of specific health conditions.

As stated in its blog post, YouTube intends to punish content promoting not only what it believes to be overtly harmful treatments but also unproven ones that are audaciously offered as replacements for recognized alternatives.

For instance, influencers suggesting vitamin C supplements or garlic for cancer may have their content removed, the post states.

This marks a substantial escalation in the Google-owned platform’s ongoing crusade against what it believes to be the dissemination of medical misinformation, heavily catalyzed by the controversial experience of battling narratives about themes such as COVID-19 and vaccines, something YouTube was heavily criticized for as truthful content ended up being censored on the platform.

YouTube had targeted vaccine “misinformation,” such as demonetizing and deleting vaccine skepticism, thereby refining their approach in response to the global pandemic situation.

August 16, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | 1 Comment

RFK Jr. Sues YouTube and Google, Alleges ‘Misinformation Policies’ Violated His First Amendment Rights

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 4, 2023

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Children’s Health Defense founder and chairman on leave, this week filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, alleging the social media giant violated his First Amendment rights.

According to Kennedy, who is running for the Democratic nomination for president of the U.S., YouTube engaged in a “censorship campaign” that included removing videos of his speech at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire and interviews he did with clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson and podcaster Joe Rogan.

The complaint, filed Aug. 2 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges the U.S. government has taken “extraordinary steps” under Joe Biden’s leadership “to silence people it does not want Americans to hear,” including himself and many others.

That censorship makes it difficult for Kennedy to reach millions of voters and also for his supporters to amplify his message, the complaint says.

The lawsuit predicts the censorship will continue throughout Kennedy’s campaign, intensifying as the primaries approach.

“Mr. Kennedy often speaks at length about topics people would like to ignore, including the negative health effects of toxic chemicals and potential safety concerns about the COVID-19 shots,” the complaint reads. Then YouTube uses its “medical misinformation” policies — developed in partnership with federal government agencies and the Biden administration — to justify removing his videos.

In doing so, the platform censored not only Kennedy’s comments on medical issues, but the entire content of his speeches and interviews, according to the suit.

Although YouTube is a private company, it is not simply a publisher, the complaint alleges — it has become “an important platform for political discourse in America, a digital town square that voters trust as a place to get news and opinions about the issues of the day.”

According to the complaint:

“YouTube operates as a public forum, the digital equivalent of a town square. As such, it cannot remove protected speech, especially political speech, based on its viewpoint. …

“There is a sufficiently close nexus between YouTube and the federal government such that YouTube’s actions may be fairly treated as that of the government itself.”

Although YouTube cited its own COVID-19 vaccine misinformation policies to censor Kennedy, those policies “rely entirely on government officials to decide what information gets censored,” according to the lawsuit.

For example, the suit says YouTube doesn’t allow content that “contradicts local health authorities’ (LHA) or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19,” and the guidance on those policies only changes based on government decisions.

Kennedy also called YouTube’s medical misinformation policies “unconstitutional” because they are “vague” and “overbroad” and “because they give unnamed government officials, who the policies depend entirely on, the unfettered discretion to decide what information gets removed from YouTube.”

Kennedy is seeking injunctive relief to prohibit YouTube from further censoring his speech, and the restoration of any videos of his political speech removed during the campaign.

Kennedy also seeks a declaration that Google and YouTube violated his First Amendment rights and that its medical disinformation policies are unconstitutional.

Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

August 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

YouTube Censors Australian Politician’s Maiden Speech to Parliament

By Rebekah Barnett | Brownstone Institute | July 8, 2023

‘30 minutes of truth bombs’ is how one Twitter user described Liberal Democrat John Ruddick’s maiden speech to the New South Wales (NSW) Parliament, last Wednesday 28 June.

Indeed, Ruddick, who left the Liberal Party in 2021 after public disagreements over the Party’s handling of the pandemic response, said out loud in parliament what many Australians have been saying for some time now – at first privately, around dinner tables, but increasingly more publicly, over workplace water coolers or at the pub, as saying the obvious becomes more socially acceptable.

Nevertheless, what is socially acceptable offline is not necessarily acceptable on social media. YouTube swiftly removed Ruddick’s speech from its platform, just seven hours after it was uploaded. The NSW Liberal Democrats say this is the first time in Australian history that a politician’s maiden speech has been censored by the platform.

The interference of the social media giant in Australia’s political discourse is ironic given this line from Ruddick’s speech: “We libertarians are plotting to take over the world … so we can leave you all alone.”

A spokesperson for the Lib Dems says, “We initially posted the video on party founder Dr John Humphreys’ YouTube account. We then circulated that link on other social media – for example, this tweet from Dr John, which you can see now links to a takedown notice.”

YouTube claims that the video violated its ‘medical misinformation policy’, and implied that removing the video was necessary to ensure that YouTube remains a ‘safe place for all.’

Note the definition of ‘medical misinformation’ as information that, “contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19.”

Hear that? Galileo just rolled in his grave.

So what did Ruddick actually say about Covid that might have disturbed the information gatekeepers?

  • He said that the NSW government had enacted an “authoritarian Covid police state.”
  • He said that the NSW government had given in to “vaccine extremism,” telling the public, ‘we won’t let you out until you take multiple injections of not only a rushed vaccine but of an entirely new class of vaccine’.
  • He said that, “NSW Health published weekly data showing, the fewer vaccines you had, the less likely you went to hospital or ICU. The fatality rate was similar for the vaxxed and the unvaxxed.”
  • He said that, “since the vaccine rollout there has been a 15-20 per cent increase in excess deaths in nations like Australia that had mass mRNA injections,” and questioned whether this might have anything to do with the vaccines, or from locking people up for so long.
  • He said that take-up of the fifth shot is low – “too many know of others with bad reactions.”
  • He said that ivermectin, an anti-viral drug that won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine, was disingenuously smeared as a horse dewormer. He noted the financial incentives for suppressing ivermectin as a potential treatment for Covid, despite researchers around the world testifying to its efficacy.
  • He said that there have been over 137,000 adverse events reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration following Covid vaccination, and that many drugs have been pulled from the market for far less than this.

Agree or disagree as you please, but all these claims are evidence-based. As a friend of mine said when disagreeing with my insistence, in late 2021, that the vaccines would not be effective in preventing/reducing transmission, “We believe different scientists.”

The video of Ruddick’s maiden speech has been reposted on YouTube via the Lib Dems main account, and has not yet been taken down. You can watch the speech in full via the Lib Dems twitter account.

Spectator has also published the transcript of Ruddick’s speech in full.

A spokesperson for the Lib Dems said on Friday,

“We’re obviously very disappointed that YouTube feels the need to censor something not only from NSW Parliament but as time-honoured as a maiden speech, but we also oddly must thank them as we’ve benefited from the Streisand effect.

“The video already has over 225,000 views on one tweet, and is also being viewed in Facebook groups, on Telegram and (for now anyway) a little bit on the federal LibDems YouTube page. The interest in the speech certainly seems to have increased exponentially after the YouTube removal, and we’re getting inundated with positive comments and questions.”

Other notable ‘truth bombs’ from Ruddick’s speech include his criticism of blown-out government debt, and his concern that pursuing a net zero carbon economy is a “reckless folly.”

While the Lib Dems are benefiting from the Streisand effect for the time being, Member of the European Parliament, Christine Anderson, is dealing with YouTube censorship by suing the social media platform. Anderson reports that YouTube blocked two videos from parliamentary sessions in which she acted on the official Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Anderson has described YouTube’s censorship as “anti-democratic,” saying, “I will not put up with uncontrolled influence on this scale, which is why I have now taken the necessary legal steps to… ensure that all citizens have unfiltered access to relevant information at all times.”

Rebekah Barnett reports from Western Australia. She is a volunteer interviewer for Jab Injuries Australia and holds a BA in Communications from the University of Western Australia. Find her work on her Substack page, Dystopian Down Under.

July 8, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 2 Comments

YouTube Censors Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

By Jonathan Turley | June 20, 2023

YouTube has continued its censorship of those with opposing positions on Covid 19 and vaccines. This week it prevented users from hearing the views of Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Despite Kennedy running on the failures of the pandemic response, YouTube will not allow users to hear what it considers harmful thoughts.

On Sunday, both Kennedy and podcast host Jordan Peterson tweeted that they were the latest to be censored by the company. Kennedy tweeted: “What do you think… Should social media platforms censor presidential candidates? My conversation with [Peterson] was deleted by [YouTube].”

He added: “Luckily you can watch it here on [Twitter] (thank you [Elon Musk]).”

The incident shows why many on the left continue an unrelenting attack on Musk and Twitter. Musk eliminated most of the company’s censorship system and, despite a few censorship controversies, the site is now the most open social media site among the major companies.

A Google spokesperson told Fox News Digital YouTube “removed a video from the Jordan Peterson channel for violating YouTube’s general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities.”

Rather than allow experts and others to debate that question, Google and YouTube will not allow the debate to occur. It is consistent with calls from Democratic leaders for dissenting voices to be removed on subjects ranging from Covid to gender identity to climate control.

We have been discussing efforts by figures like Hillary Clinton to enlist European countries to force Twitter to restore censorship rules. Unable to rely on corporate censorship or convince users to embrace censorship, Clinton and others are resorting to good old-fashioned state censorship, even asking other countries to censor the speech of American citizens.

President Joe Biden has at times acted as a virtual censor-in-chief, denouncing social-media companies for “killing people” by not censoring enough. Recently, he expressed doubt that the public can “know the truth” without such censorship by “editors” in Big Tech. There is growing evidence of long-suspected back channels between government and Democratic political figures and Big Tech. Some of those contacts were recently confirmed but Congress again refused to investigate.

For years, scientists faced censorship for even raising the lab theory as a possible explanation for the virus. Their reputations and careers were shredded by a media flash mob. The Washington Post declared this a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times’ Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli was calling any mention of the lab theory “racist.”

When a Chinese researcher told Fox News that this was man-made, the network was attacked and the left-leaning PolitiFact slammed her with a “pants on fire rating.”

The mask mandate and other pandemic measures like the closing of schools are now cited as fueling emotional and developmental problems in children. The closing of schools and businesses was challenged by some critics as unnecessary. Many of those critics were also censored. It now appears that they may have been right. Many countries did not close schools and did not experience increases in Covid. However, we are now facing alarming drops in testing scores and alarming rises in medical illness among the young.

The point is only that there were countervailing indicators on mask efficacy and a basis to question the mandates. Yet, there was no real debate because of the censorship supported by many Democratic leaders in social media. To question such mandates was declared a public health threat and what the WHO called our “infodemic.”

A lawsuit was filed by Missouri and Louisiana and joined by leading experts, including Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya (Stanford University) and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University). Bhattacharya previously objected to the suspension of Dr. Clare Craig after she raised concerns about Pfizer trial documents. Those doctors were the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a more focused Covid response that targeted the most vulnerable population rather than widespread lockdowns and mandates. Many are now questioning the efficacy and cost of the massive lockdown as well as the real value of masks and the rejection of natural immunities as an alternative to vaccination.  Yet, these experts and others were attacked for such views just a year ago. Some found themselves censored on social media for challenging claims of Dr. Fauci and others.

The media has quietly acknowledged the science questioning mask efficacy and school closures without addressing its own role in attacking those who raised these objections.

Yet, the censorship continues to the point that even a presidential candidate is now being silenced on social media.

The censorship of Kennedy is a national disgrace. Despite the proven legitimacy of prior censorship of viewpoints like the lab theory and natural immunities, Google continues to silence those with opposing views.

YouTube is signaling that this election will be another exercise in corporate approved messaging and ideas.

If you want to use YouTube, you will now have to engage in self-censorship, eliminating views that Google disagrees with. You may be able to “Broadcast Yourself” but you must first “Censor Yourself” . . .  or YouTube will do it for you.

June 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Google Renews Its Partnership With The WHO

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | May 25, 2023

Google has renewed its partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide what it calls “factual” information about different diseases and conditions. The partnership is positioned as a way to combat what it says is the spread of medical “misinformation” observed during the pandemic.

On Google search, there are already Knowledge Panels at the top of results when users search for certain conditions and diseases.

Soon, the Knowledge Panels will include more conditions and illnesses like depressive disorder, Ebola, COPD, malaria, hypertension, diabetes, Mpox, and others, all using information verified by the WHO.

In a previous partnership, Google awarded more than $320 million to the WHO in Ad Grants to help spread its medical information. In the new partnership, Google awarded the global public health organization an additional $50 million to continue the efforts.

The WHO has been criticized more in frequent years for calling for censorship while itself putting out information during the pandemic that turned out to ultimately be untrue.

Google’s YouTube was criticized for censoring anything that went against the WHO during the pandemic, even if independent commentators ended up being correct.

May 25, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

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