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YouTube Escalates War on Free Speech

The sad events of January 6 have provided Big Tech another excuse to ramp up their censorship. For example, the next day, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced new policies for the video platform, explaining they would apply a “strike” and temporary account suspension for anyone posting a “false claim,” and that with three strikes accounts would be permanently removed.

Notably, Wojcicki did not restrict this new policy to election fraud. Any “false claim,” from election fraud to a doctor talking about alternative therapies to treat COVID-19, or whatever, is subject to the new policy. Bear in mind the thin, often imperceptible line between fact and opinion, and the significance of what YouTube has done is magnified.

But censorship is busting out all over. Facebook and Twitter have both just banned President Trump’s accounts. If these platforms, which still attract the vast majority of social media users in America, can ban the President of the United States, they can ban anyone. For anything.

These high profile acts of censorship mask more subtle operations on lesser known victims. Earlier this week we marveled at YouTube’s tolerance of an interview with Catherine Austin Fitts, a financial entrepreneur and former high ranking official with HUD. Fitts offered dystopian but informative thoughts on where the world is headed, in a 48 minute interview that covered the topics of economic authoritarianism, the future of the U.S. dollar, transhumanism, global elites, and – gasp – how the COVID pandemic is providing an excuse to institute controls necessary to convert the planet from democratic processes to technocracy.

Between 12/22/2020 and 1/06/2021, the video earned nearly 3.0 million views.

And then it was gone.

Nothing Fitts had to say ought to be forbidden speech. The fact that it was taken down just raises Fitts credibility, at the same time as it fuels conspiracy theories, because there is no reasonable explanation for why YouTube would unilaterally disable a video with content that appears to be nothing more than harmless speculation.

This particular YouTube interview could not be found elsewhere. But Fitts does have a robust presence on alternative platforms. Find much of the same topics being explored by Fitts by entering her name into the search box on BitChute. Decide for yourself if her thoughts ought to be cancelled by the Big Tech overlords.

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YouTube Terminates Vincent James O’Connor

This week YouTube terminated the account of Vincent James O’Connor, whose “Red Elephants” channel produced daily videos that had earned him nearly 400,000 subscribers.

YouTube, as usual, provided no information for the ban. O’Connor’s content, while certainly unpalatable to the politically correct, included diligent research. He backed up his arguments with well documented facts that cannot easily be found anywhere, much less on any mainstream media. He certainly said nothing that wouldn’t be protected under the First Amendment.

In anticipation of being banned, O’Connor launched a BitChute channel, The Red Elephants, but even with already 40,000 subscribers it has nowhere near the reach of the original, which took several years, and thousands of hours of work. And that is the intention of big tech censorship; to erase the work of right-wing dissidents, and make them start over.

O’Connor can also still be found on Telegram, DLive, Parler, and Gab, but as we’ve seen with other banned channels that have migrated to these alternatives, so far none of them have managed to attract even a small fraction of the subscribers and views they’d acquired on YouTube.

Like it or not YouTube has a near monopoly on the online audience for long-form videos. Even when relentlessly suppressed, dissident voices on YouTube reach far more viewers than they will anywhere else.

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