YouTube’s Policy on COVID-19 and Climate Change Sets Dangerous Precedent

YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki‎ has declared that they will “remove any content that goes against WHO recommendations” on the coronavirus pandemic, essentially censoring any opinion other than that of the World Health Organization.

This is not the first time YouTube has censored information with which it disagrees. Last year, the online streaming site said it would censor videos that do not agree with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s exaggerated claims about global warming.

This move by YouTube sets a dangerous precedent for censorship and has the potential to restrict the flow of information from competing sources—something that has been essential to the discovery of both truths and falsehoods and so to the growth of knowledge.

If anything, YouTube should be cautious of WHO, and not the other sources. It was WHO that made big blunders.

In January, WHO declared that COVID-19 was not transmittable from humans to humans. WHO relayed the same information on its website, YouTube, and Twitter.

WHO tweeted, “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.”

Three months down the line, the world finds itself in the midst of a catastrophic pandemic driven by human-to-human transmission.

Does YouTube care about this blatant error and how much it has cost governments and populations that were left unprepared because of it?

Instead, YouTube recognizes WHO as the ultimate authority on the COVID-19 pandemic and is ready to blindly censor any opinion contrary to WHO’s.

However, YouTube is not alone in this war on information. YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook removed posts by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro which contained information on the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine.

There is absolutely nothing controversial about his posts, as the efficacy of the drug in treating COVID-19 is currently being tested by the United States Centers for Disease Control. The President of United States even requested India to release the drug to other countries, and India agreed.

Interestingly, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube did not ban the White House official briefings that contained information on hydroxychloroquine. So, social media CEOs get to choose who’s lucky and who’s not.

YouTube is known for courting controversy with censorship, especially on the issue of climate change.

In 2018, YouTube experimented with labeling videos that did not comply with the popular climate doomsday theory perpetrated by the United Nations and other climate alarmists.

Earlier this year, a Democrat senator demanded that YouTube take down videos that do not comply with the United Nation’s view on extreme climate change and its belief about an imminent climate doomsday.

YouTube is perilously close to being a science denier by choosing to promote only one side of the coin on issues of critical global socio-economic significance.

It is ironic that YouTube accuses those censored as spreading “misinformation” while simultaneously deciding to consider organizations like WHO and the UN as ultimate authorities despite their own serious errors on climate change and COVID-19.

Unchallenged, such censorship will cripple scientific discourse and the scientific progress that depends on it.

This time ideas, speech and research will be controlled by those who control the electronic news rather than by the church.

Eerily familiar...

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

16. Ministry Of Truth

.......

The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.

The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.

There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

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