YouTube deleted one of the House January 6th Select Committee’s hearing videos this week after finding its inclusion of an early January 2021 clip of fat former President Trump ranting to Lou Dobbs with lies about votes being switched and other nonsense violated their policy on 2020 election disinfo, even though they weren’t propagating the claim, the New York Times reports
“Our election integrity policy prohibits content advancing false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, if it does not provide sufficient context,” YouTube spokeswoman Ivy Choi told the Times. “We enforce our policies equally for everyone, and have removed the video uploaded by the Jan. 6 committee channel.”
Emphasis added to, well, emphasize how fucking stupid this is. What would be a more sufficient context than a Congressional hearing for which the entire thing, beginning to end, is to examine how Trump’s lies about the 2020 election led to a brutal attack on the Capitol building? YouTube is great, we love it. It’s a resource unparalleled in human history (yes, it’s filled with bullshit too) and great for our purposes here at National Zero to bang out clips of newsworthy video ganked from Twitter and other platforms. But this shit is ridiculous and we’ve been caught up in it at least a half dozen times ourselves – with hundreds of videos embedded in our articles from 2020 and 2021 deleted in a single purge of one of Jack’s channels. We even started using shitty right wing knockoff Rumble to publish clips we think will run afoul of YouTube’s algorithms.
The worst part is that even though we’re being accused of propagating the demented shit we’re reporting by this dumbass policy, it’s still kind of necessary. We would actually rather deal with this than the YouTube of the pre-COVID-19 and 2020 election era, before the biggest names in tech started cracking down on hateful right wing disinformation and let pretty much everything go. For all the bells that can’t be unrung from the Trump era, and all the alternative platforms that have sprung up since, it sure is nice not having to report on some new QAnon-linked conspiracy story spreading on YouTube and Twitter. Facebook’s a different story, of course, because they still love the MAGA bullshit there despite some lip service policy changes, but overall social media is a way more fragmented disinformation environment than it used to be back when the right wingers could get away with more or less anything they wanted. Getting a strike on YouTube is a small price to pay, as frustrating and nonsensical it can be for the good guys sometimes.