YouTube censors another RFK Jr interview; Kennedy says platform protecting political establishment
Fox News
Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced online that another of his interviews has been removed from social media giant YouTube.
Kennedy announced that his interview with former New York Post reporter Al Guart had been taken off the prominent video-sharing platform.
The Democrat challenger to President Biden in the 2024 primaries has already seen one of his interviews removed from YouTube due to an apparent violation of the website’s vaccine misinformation policy.
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“[YouTube] just pulled another of my videos, with former NY Post political reporter [Guart],” Kennedy wrote in a Tuesday Twitter thread. “People made a big deal about Russia supposedly manipulating internet information to influence a Presidential election. Shouldn’t we be worried when giant tech corporations do the same?”
“When industry and government are so closely linked, there is little difference between ‘private’ and ‘government’ censorship,” he continued. “Suppression of free speech is not suddenly OK when it is contracted out to the private corporations that control the public square.”
Kennedy wrote that the “Twitter Files proved that numerous government agencies, acting through the FBI, told Twitter whom to censor” and that “Twitter complied.”
“Doubtless, Facebook, YouTube, and the rest received similar requests,” Kennedy wrote.
“In the case of my interview with [Guart], [YouTube] probably acted on its own initiative,” he continued. “It has internalized the political wishes of the establishment to the point where it knows what to censor without being told.”
Google, YouTube’s parent company, did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Kennedy’s comments came after YouTube took down a different interview between the Democrat presidential candidate and podcast host Jordan Peterson, citing the website’s vaccine misinformation policy.
This month, both Kennedy and Peterson tweeted that the video-sharing website had taken down their interview from an episode of Peterson’s show and accused the social media platform of censorship and interfering with a presidential campaign.
A Google spokesperson previously told Fox News Digital that YouTube “removed a video from the Jordan Peterson channel for violating YouTube’s general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities.”
The spokesperson also said the company “removed a video from the Jordan Peterson channel featuring a conversation with Robert F Kennedy Jr.” and that Google’s “Community Guidelines apply equally to all creators on our platform, regardless of political viewpoint.”
“Under our general vaccine misinformation policies, we remove false claims about currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and the WHO. This includes content that falsely alleges that approved vaccines are dangerous and cause chronic health effects, claims that vaccines do not reduce transmission or contraction of disease, or contains misinformation on the substances contained in vaccines will be removed. This would include content that falsely says that approved vaccines cause autism, cancer or infertility, or that substances in vaccines can track those who receive them.”
“Our policies not only cover specific routine immunizations like for measles or Hepatitis B, but also apply to general statements about vaccines,” the spokesperson said. “Content that would otherwise violate our Community Guidelines may stay on YouTube when it has Educational, Documentary, Scientific, or Artistic (EDSA) context, such as providing countervailing views to the remarks that violate our policies.”
In the interview, Kennedy said that “a lot of the sexual dysphoria” America is seeing comes from exposure to chemicals in the water.