YouTube admits to removing over one million videos in the name of “keeping people safe” from COVID and over 10 million other videos in the first quarter of 2021. Hidden within the defence of this “reasonable” policy, is a new committment to their role as a censor using only “trusted sources” of information and filtering content: You-Tube Press Release. You can easily miss this committment as the writer distracts you with a preamble that  disarms you by pretending to be on the side of free speech:

We’re seeing disturbing new momentum around governments ordering the takedown of content for political purposes. And I personally believe we’re better off as a society when we can have an open debate. One person’s misinfo is often another person’s deeply held belief, including perspectives that are provocative, potentially offensive, or even in some cases, include information that may not pass a fact checker’s scrutiny.

However, immediately following this is a tremendous qualification and a new committment to their role as censor:

Yet, our support of an open platform means an even greater accountability to connect people with quality information. And we will continue investing in and innovating across all our products to strike a sensible balance between freedom of speech and freedom of reach (emphasis added)

All these “investments and innovations” are a committment to censoring material and are designed to cement You-Tube as politically acceptable, indeed a political partner, of the makers and shakers of the political elite.  If a “sensible balance” equates to the opinion of government ‘experts’ and consesus science, they are a censor.  At one time these platforms were about allowing people to assess the information for themselves and to judge it for themselves, even create it themselves and directly reach their audience, bypassing the big-players. The very concept of an open-platform was because government information or official science were engendered and could not be trusted, the official or approved COVID-sources have repeatedly been demonstrated to be in that category.

The tragedy is people are living in fear unncessarily or are suffering severe side-effects or are dying from a vaccine which in the vast majority of cases they do not need and which is predictably becoming ineffective in the places where it has been used most extensively. It should be no surprise Israel is seeking alternatives to the vaccine (particularly early treatment and prophylactic ues of HCQ, Ivermectin, Vitamin-D, Zinc therapy and similar immune boosters or anti-virals) as the double-vaccinated are now seriously ill in hospital. We should be hearing about this but are not, at one time social-media was a way of getting this information out.

The positive aspect of this is that there are now a number of alternative platforms such as BitChute and Rumble which have made anti-censorship committments. For this reason, there can be some distasteful and unpalatable material on them which detractors like to call ‘far-right’ or ‘conspiracy’ but you can sift through material as you should. If material is unlawful, it can and should be removed, preferably by a self-policing community but what we need to avoid is the above ‘ordering of takedown of material’ that politicians and their allies arbitrarily demand because it is ‘off-message’. If people, including you, start moving onto them to escape censorship from the big-players and this diversifies the market, makes these hosts for less fringe opinion, a viable alternative and helps the cause of free-speech, we can rejoice and be glad!

Acknowledgment:  originally brought to my attention through Gary North – Specific Answers