The Big Tech giant YouTube has taken even further unprecedented actions to censor the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, by deleting multiple videos of his recent speech at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), as reported by Breitbart.
In addition to multiple different versions of the hour-and-a-half-long speech that were posted on the website, the platform also took direct action against one channel in particular: The Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN), which rose to prominence for consistently live-streaming virtually every single event featuring President Trump, from rallies on the campaign trail to speeches as president.
The RSBN YouTube channel was hit with a two-week suspension by YouTube for their posting of the CPAC speech, which had garnered over 4 million views. During the two-week period, RSBN is forbidden from posting any further videos or live-streaming until the suspension expires.
This penalty is notably the same that is applied to channels in violation of YouTube’s policies for a third consecutive time, as part of the platform’s “three strikes” system. Normally, a channel that posts content in violation of YouTube’s vague policies will first get a warning, with no repercussions. Then they will face their “first strike,” at which point they will be banned from posting or live-streaming for one week, followed by the second strike with the same penalties that RSBN is currently facing. The third and final strike results in a permanent deletion of the channel and all of its content. This means that, despite not suffering any prior strikes, YouTube skipped straight to the second strike level of penalties for RSBN over President Trump’s speech.
RSBN released a statement revealing that YouTube had told them that “countervailing viewpoints” during their coverage of Trump’s speech could have avoided their ban, essentially disagreeing with everything he said during his speech as it happened live.
“We won’t censor President Trump,” RSBN’s statement concluded, “or push back against things he says that, quite frankly, we agree with.”
YouTube also released a statement confirming that they had banned RSBN over President Trump’s CPAC speech, once again claiming that his speech violated their so-called “presidential election integrity policy,” which forbids any criticism of the 2020 election despite widespread evidence that voter fraud took place in that election. President Trump’s speech emphasized the overwhelming proof that there were significant irregularities in the election process last year, and also outlined a clear plan for Republicans to fight back against mass voter fraud going into the 2022 and 2024 elections.