YouTube now permits election fraud content as 2024 election ‘well underway’
YouTube will no longer censor content claiming there was widespread fraud in past presidential elections, the company announced Friday, as the 2024 general election comes underway.
Perhaps more than other social media platforms, the Google-owned streaming video giant embraces censorship and removes any content it deems “misinformation”. This has included fraud in the 2020 presidential election, the origin of COVID-19, the efficacy of masks, the safety and efficacy of the COVID shots, challenges to anthropogenic climate change and even the phrase “new world order”. Repeat offenders are banned.
But for reasons unknown, YouTube has suddenly reversed its decision regarding claims about widespread fraud in past presidential elections.
"Two years, tens of thousands of video removals, and one election cycle later, we recognized it was time to reevaluate the effects of this policy in today's changed landscape," YouTube said in a statement, according to Axios.
The company was open about the fact that their decision is timed with the 2024 election.
"With that in mind, and with 2024 campaigns well underway, we will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections."
YouTube did not say what prompted its decision, but it comes as Republicans signal they are ready to embrace questionable voting methods used by Democrats — such as mail-in voting and ballot harvesting — in the coming election.
YouTube’s decision, however, may trigger a ripple effect across other platforms and mainstream media outlets, who along with YouTube form the Trusted News Initiative conglomerate.
The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) is a coalition of the world’s largest news publishers and social media networks. Together, they form a supreme court of truth which adjudicates on what information gets passed to the public and what is withheld.
Then-BBC Director-General Tony Hall, who chaired the group when it was formed in 2019, said the purpose was “to tackle the rise of misinformation.” The words used by Jessica Cecil, who founded the TNI, were to find “practical ways to choke off” certain information and not “in any way muzzl[e] our own journalism.”
Current members of the TNI include The Washington Post, ABC News, Associated Press, AFP, The Financial Times, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, European Broadcasting Union, Reuters, Meta (Facebook), Twitter, Google/YouTube and Microsoft.
By 2020, TNI had a system set up by which the corporations would alert each other to unapproved information, which would immediately be scoured from the mainstream internet.
BBC World Service Group Director Jamie Angus said in October 2020, “Our Trusted News Initiative is [an] international partnership initiative convened by the BBC, which links media organisations and social-media platforms. The group has developed a shared early-warning system to alert partners about Disinformation.”
It was the TNI that decided to sideline or ban any reporting that COVID may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, that the COVID vaccines do not prevent infection, that vaccinated people can transmit COVID to others, that there was fraud in the 2020 presidential election and that compromising emails and videos were found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.
But not only were publishers who reported such information exiled from the information highway — sites that simply reported that such claims were being made by potentially credible sources were also sidelined.
BBC’s Jessica Cecil made several statements about the “fast alert” system set up between TNI members.
“We don’t fact check; but once we learn from a partner that something is unreliable, that’s when we alert each other. . . . [A]ll participants signed up to a clear set of expectations of how to act,” said Cecil in 2021.
