YouTube - Further Controlling the COVID-19 Vaccine Narrative

For those of you that have read George Orwell's 1984, one of my favourite books, Winston Smith, an employee at the ironically named Ministry of Truth, is responsible for destroying history that is inconvenient to the Party.  Over the past two years, it has become increasingly obvious that we are living under the same sort of authoritarianism, in this case, led by the world's social media platforms.

  

In its latest move to destroy any narrative that doesn't follow its preferred version of the pandemic and accompanying vaccine rollout, YouTube, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google's parent company, has made the following announcement:

 

 

Here are some highlights:

 

"Crafting policy around medical misinformation comes charged with inherent challenges and tradeoffs. Scientific understanding evolves as new research emerges, and firsthand, personal experience regularly plays a powerful role in online discourse. Vaccines in particular have been a source of fierce debate over the years, despite consistent guidance from health authorities about their effectiveness. Today, we're expanding our medical misinformation policies on YouTube with new guidelines on currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and the WHO.

 

Our Community Guidelines already prohibit certain types of medical misinformation. We've long removed content that promotes harmful remedies, such as saying drinking turpentine can cure diseases. At the onset of COVID-19, we built on these policies when the pandemic hit, and worked with experts to develop 10 new policies around COVID-19 and medical misinformation. Since last year, we’ve removed over 130,000 videos for violating our COVID-19 vaccine policies."

 

Notice how proud YouTube is of its ability to remove over 130,000 videos.  Way to go, YouTube!

 

So, what is being banned?

  

"...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."

 

YouTube claims that they have consulted with local and international health organizations and other experts when designing their program of antivaccine censorship.  I'm guessing that the World Health Organization aka the Bill Gates Health Organization was part of the team which helped establish YouTube's guidelines.

 

Not to worry though, YouTube is still allowing content that is important to the ongoing debate regarding vaccines and will allow the following:

 

"...we will continue to allow content about vaccine policies, new vaccine trials, and historical vaccine successes or failures on YouTube. Personal testimonials relating to vaccines will also be allowed, so long as the video doesn't violate other Community Guidelines, or the channel doesn't show a pattern of promoting vaccine hesitancy."

 

Given that absolutely no scientist has a complete picture of both the harms and protections offered by the COVID-19 vaccines since Phase 3 trials are not scheduled for completion for at least the next year, YouTube certainly seems to have cornered the market on "vaccine truth".

 

Just in case you cared, here is YouTube's newly crafted Vaccine information policy:

 

Joseph Goebbels would be utterly amazed at how easily the social media platforms of the new millennium have been at crafting a narrative that suits their own version of reality.  Unfortunately, YouTube hadn't quite come to the realization that controlling the vaccine narrative is not necessarily in its best interest business wise.  Thanks to YouTube's increasingly heavy-handed censorship, a number of alternative media platforms (i.e. Bitchute, Odysee etcetera) have appeared where censorship is non-existent, allowing determined physicians and researchers to spread their message to the masses.  I hate to tell YouTube, but the world can live without videos of cats and car accidents.