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These days, there may be many other more pressing issues going on in the world to censor – at least from the point of view of YouTube – but Google’s video platform is unable to let go of former US President Donald Trump, either.
Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN), which is considered a pro-Trump channel, on Tuesday announced that YouTube had suspended it just in time to prevent the coverage of a Trump rally in Georgia.
This isn’t the first time YouTube has preemptively and suspiciously suspended the channel just before a Trump rally.
RSBN specified in a press release that the channel could neither live-stream nor upload content to YouTube for one week.
Perhaps as pretext for this suspiciously well-timed decision, the giant previously deleted two RSBN videos, citing policy violations.
Trump was interviewed in one of those videos, while the other was with Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Judging by the RSBN statement, YouTube behaved in the usual way, without providing concrete reasons, past very broad definitions like election misinformation, and particularly nebulous ones like insufficient “context” (which, if applied consistently as a rule stemming from Google’s policy, would likely eliminate most of the content on the platform.)
And the reaction of RSBN has been about as predictable as YouTube’s censorship: they will seek alternatives. Trump’s Georgia rally will be live-streamed after all, the channel said – only this will be happening on Rumble.
A YouTube spokesperson said that RSBN had received a strike based on violation of the company’s “election integrity” policy. The policy prohibits creators from questioning whether the outcome of the 2020 US presidential vote was rigged, or plagued with any kind of fraud.
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