Digital giant, YouTube has intensified efforts at muzzling voices against COVID vaccine by removing all contents it deemed ‘vaccine misinformation’ from its platform.
The move comes as the platform broadens its ‘vaccine misinformation’ crackdown, now removing content that questions any approved medical #vaccines, not just Covid-related jabs.
Recall that the social media giant had in June down at least a dozen videos posted by officials that featured what it described as misinformation, including claims that the coronavirus vaccine is killing people or that the virus isn’t a real problem, but reversed course and created an exception to its content moderation rules for other videos.
Local government officials in North Carolina, Washington state, and Kansas complained about YouTube’s censorship and the limiting of public access to government meetings thanks to YouTube’s removal of city council and school board meetings, the Washington Post reported.
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“While we have clear policies to remove harmful COVID-19 misinformation, we also recognize the importance of organizations like school districts and city councils using YouTube to share recordings of open public forums, even when comments at those forums may violate our policies,” YouTube said in a statement.
In a severe departure from the site’s previously more-relaxed approach to content censorship, with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki claiming recently that ‘free speech’ remains a core value, the video-sharing platform has already deplatformed high-profile channels associated with #vaccine skeptics like Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#YouTube said in a statement that it is now ‘more important than ever to expand the work we started with Covid-19 to other vaccines,’ having removed over 1m videos that they deemed ‘misinformative’ on #Covid since February 2020.
The Google-run site added that ‘As with any significant update, it will take time for our systems to fully ramp up enforcement.’