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Ironic twist as J6 committee censored by YouTube for ‘advancing election misinformation’

June 18, 2022 | | Print Article

The Jan. 6th committee that’s despised by most Republicans just got censored by YouTube for “advancing election misinformation” in what appears to be an unexpected, serendipitous, ironic, and hilarious twist of fate.

“The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot has been trying to draw more eyes to its televised hearings by uploading clips of the proceedings online. But YouTube has removed one of those videos from its platform, saying the committee was advancing election misinformation,” The New York Times reported Thursday.

The video in question contained testimony from Trump-era Attorney General Bill Barr. But there was just one little problem: The clip also included footage of former President Donald Trump questioning the validity of the 2020 presidential election.

“We had glitches where they moved thousands of votes from my account to Biden’s account,” Trump reportedly said in the clip, adding that the FBI and Department of Justice may have been involved in this alleged transgression.

According to the Times, this snippet led to the video being “replaced with a black box stating that the clip had been removed for violating YouTube’s terms of service.”

(Source: YouTube)

In a statement to the Times, a YouTube spokesperson defended the decision to remove the video.

“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. We enforce our policies equally for everyone, and have removed the video uploaded by the Jan. 6 committee channel,” they said.

However, thanks to pressure from the left-wing press, it appears YouTube is already beginning to backtrack.

“The message on the video page has since been changed to ‘This video is private,’ which may mean that YouTube would allow the committee to upload a version of the clip that makes clear that Trump’s claims are false,” the Times confirmed.

Conservatives for their part appear to find news of the committee being censored to be absolutely, unequivocally hilarious.

Look:

However, YouTube’s decision does fit into a troubling larger pattern.

As previously reported, earlier this month YouTube deleted a New York Post interview of Aaron Mostofsky, a Jan. 6th protester, that was conducted during the riot last year.

In the interview, Mostofsky said he showed up at the Capitol to “express my opinion as a free American, my beliefs that this election was stolen.”

When asked whether members of Congress should be afraid of him and the other rioters, he replied, “They shouldn’t be afraid.”

YouTube reportedly deleted the video because of the same policy that was used to justify censoring the Jan. 6th committee.

Furthermore, YouTube deleted it despite the fact that the interview had been “cited by other news outlets and used by the DOJ,” as noted in a statement by Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression official Nico Perrino.

“The memoryholing of information is a historian and journalist’s worst nightmare. Labeling the expression of certain beliefs ‘misinformation’ to justify removing that expression from content libraries and platforms sets a dangerous precedent,” Perrino said.

“It restricts our ability to understand people’s real motivations and therefore to understand current and past events. In this case, the fact that the content that was removed was original reporting by a journalist makes its removal all the more chilling.”

According to Reason magazine’s Robby Soave, back in March he faced the same fate and for the same reason.

“It is … the exact policy that ensnared Rising, the YouTube show I host for The Hill. In March, YouTube suspended The Hill’s channel for violating the election misinformation policy. Our crime? We played a clip of Trump making false statements about the 2020 election,” he notes for Reason.

“Neither I nor my co-host expressed any agreement with these statements; we simply reported what was said. It was an act of basic journalism, but YouTube said it was akin to promoting a prohibited viewpoint.”

Funny as it may be to see the Jan. 6th committee censored, this larger trend of censorship is clearly a problem.

“What happened to the January 6th Committee video is a powerful example of why this standard is so absurd. When policy makers, content moderators, and members of the media take a broad view of what counts as misinformation and disinformation, they are likely to incidentally forbid valid perspectives—including perspectives that are working to correct misinformation, as was the case here,” Soave continues.

“YouTube is a private company and can set whatever policies it deems best. But it seems fairly clear that the election misinformation policy is not working as intended; in fact, it is actively undermining good journalism.”

Vivek Saxena
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