Today YouTube released a statement bearing the subtitle, "Updates to our work supporting the integrity of the 2020 U.S. election." The long and short of it is they are going to be removing any video content that calls Biden's victory into question.
No big surprise for Big Tech who have really leaned into their self-appointed role as arbiters of truth this year. But disturbing nonetheless.
It starts off banal enough.
Over the past weeks and months, we've seen people coming to YouTube to learn more about where and how to vote or learning more about a candidate or an issue. We've seen news organizations grow their audience. And we've seen people turn to YouTube for the latest election results or simply to follow an historic event with the highest voting turnout in over a century in the U.S.
Our main goal going into the election season was to make sure we're connecting people with authoritative information, while also limiting the reach of misinformation and removing harmful content. The work here is ongoing and we wanted to provide an update.
Blah. Blah. Blah. We get it.
But they get around to the point eventually. Under the subheading "Removing content that violates our policies" we find that YouTube has already been aggressively removing content that has been critical of the 2020 presidential election.
Since September, we've terminated over 8000 channels and thousands of harmful and misleading elections-related videos for violating our existing policies.
Terminated.
But now that we have crossed the "safe harbor deadline" YouTube is about to get much more aggressive in this enforcement.
Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come.
There are court cases going on RIGHT NOW that are seeking to determine whether election fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. Don't you think the legal system of these United States should be where this decision made and not some website that hosts makeup tutorial videos?
The arrogance of these Big Tech companies never ceases to amaze me.
But don't worry, you will still be able to get election-related content pushed to you from "authoritative channels" (read: traditional leftist media outlets).
This is about a half step away from Chinese style state-run media.
As the great philosopher, John Mayer once wrote, "Cause when they own the information, oh they can bend it all they want."
