It is clear that Big Tech does not like conservative voices and they are doing everything they can to silence us.
Over the weekend, YouTube removed an Americans for Limited Government (ALG) video from last December with the headline, “Is America headed for a second Boston Tea Party?” The one-minute video noted that it was the 247th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party and drew parallels to events today in America. YouTube posted a vague notice on the video simply stating they had removed it because it “violated community guidelines.”
YouTube’s Community Guidelines page lists the following categories of content violations:
- Spam & deceptive practices
- Fake Engagement
- Impersonation
- Links in content
- Spam, deceptive practices & scams
- Sensitive content
- Child safety
- Custom thumbnails
- Nudity and sexual content
- Suicide and self injury
- Violent or dangerous content
- Harassment and cyberbullying
- Harmful or dangerous content
- Hate speech
- Violent criminal organizations
- Violent or graphic content
- COVID-19 misinfo policy
Seeing that my video did not violate any of these guidelines, I dug further and found a Dec. 9, 2020 blog post from YouTube that may be the basis for their censorship.
“Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come. As always, news coverage and commentary on these issues can remain on our site if there’s sufficient education, documentary, scientific or artistic context.”
This is the only language in my video that could possibly be relevant to that, “…millions of American patriots … believe they have been disenfranchised by widespread election fraud, and by key states braking election laws in direct violation of the Constitution.”
Watch the video uncensored on Rumble
That is simply a statement of fact. It is shared within the historical context of the Boston Tea Party in which American colonists similarly felt disenfranchised by government taxation without representation. I did not claim the allegations of voter fraud “changed the outcome of the election.”
I appealed the removal of my video on the grounds that it is in full compliance with their community guidelines and got this reply a few hours later, “We reviewed your content carefully, and have confirmed that it violates our spam, deceptive practices and scams policy.” I found more detail on that policy back on YouTube’s Community Guidelines page: “On December 9, we started applying our Presidential Election Integrity policy (below) to the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, meaning we remove content that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election uploaded on or after December 9. We have begun issuing strikes for new content that violates the policy uploaded on or after January 7, 2021.”
And here is YouTube’s Presidential Election Intergrity policy, “Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of any past U.S. presidential election (Note: this applies to elections in the United States only). For the U.S. 2020 presidential election, this applies to content uploaded on or after December 9, 2020.”
Again, nothing in my video advances “false claims.” I simply state that many Americans believe that widespread fraud disenfranchised them. That is a fact.
ALG is 501(c) 4 non-profit organization dedicated to education and social welfare. We are limited by federal law to spending only a portion of our resources on direct political advocacy. Our communications and public policy teams are diligent in sourcing our material and staying within social media guidelines. We are shocked to see the capricious and arbitrary removal of a video that brings historical context to current day events.
“This is a partisan witch hunt,” said Rick Manning, ALG President. “This is an attempt by Big Tech to censor conservative content they don’t like. We’ve had a YouTube channel for 12 years and have noticed our videos getting fewer and fewer views in recent years. As a result, we started a channel on a competing video platform, Rumble, a few months ago. We now get more views on our Rumble videos than on YouTube. YouTube has been systematically suppressing the number of people who view conservative political content. This has been happening to many groups and individuals who share our view of limited government.”
ALG is grateful for our YouTube audience and has no plans to abandon them. However, given the current Big Tech censorship, we are encouraging all of our supporters to migrate to Rumble, not only to ensure they continue seeing our videos, but all conservative video content. It is clear that Big Tech does not like conservative voices and they are doing everything they can to silence us.
We posted the same video on Rumble and have had no problems with censorship. Please subscribe to our Rumble channel to see more videos like this.
Catherine Mortensen is Vice President of Communications at Americans for Limited Government.
