YouTube has deleted former President Donald Trump’s speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and suspended Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) for two weeks. The decision was apparently based on Trump’s continued claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
The Big Tech giant also removed the same Trump video from other outlets, including ABC News, Fox News, Fox Business, the U.K. Independent, and the U.K. Sun.
The Gateway Pundit reported the former president’s speech received more than 30 million live streaming views across multiple platforms. The views included 5.8 million views on Fox News and 1.5 million on Newsmax. The totals far outnumbered the Golden Globes airing the same day that had 6.9 million viewers.
Right Side Broadcasting had 3.7 million views of Trump’s speech before its removal. The action was not surprising to the network.
RSBN’s Twitter account stated prior to the video’s removal, “President Trump talked about election fraud. That’s a big no-no on some platforms we stream to. We try to play by the rules, but we will not censor President Trump. We’re not going to remove or edit this video. Just so we’re all clear — if it gets removed, we didn’t do it.”
RSBN’s website also reported, “According to YouTube, this is due to our video of President Trump’s speech at CPAC, which violated their policies on election misinformation. Any further violations may result in the permanent suspension of our YouTube channel, which has amassed over 1.5 million subscribers. We told you all that we had to be careful, and this is why. It’s a new world.”
RSBN reported the network could have avoided the two-week suspension if it had added “countervailing viewpoints” to President Trump’s claims about election irregularities. “It’s worth noting that according to YouTube’s terms, our video of Trump’s CPAC speech would have been allowed to stay up had we provided “countervailing viewpoints. Essentially we would have had to go on air and say everything Trump just said about election fraud is not true.”
A new world is right. When YouTube decides the world should no longer see speeches by a former president, who is also a potential future presidential candidate, America is no longer a land of free speech.
The slippery slope from this point could be never-ending. Will YouTube target youtubers who stream about Dr. Seuss? Will your videos of kids playing with Mr. Potato Head be a violation of policy?
We’re no longer talking about content that is criminal, but a company’s opinion. It’s certainly time for conservatives to move forward with free-speech based social platforms, but even that has become a challenge. Just ask Parler. They developed a platform reaching millions of Americans who shared a conservative, free speech perspective. Yet their app was removed and its website taken down.
Unless conservatives plan to communicate by ham radio in the days ahead, it’s time to put a stop to Big Tech’s overreach. Some conservatives in Washington get it and are working on legislation, but it’s going to take a massive push from America’s conservative voices to shift the censorship purge of Big Tech in 2021.