Independent Swedish media outlet SwebbTV (Swedish Web Television) has been booted from YouTube for “violating YouTube’s community guidelines.”
SwebbTV describes itself as a “politically and religiously independent,” citizen-funded initiative that expresses a broad range of topics and perspectives and examines events that are fundamental to democracy. It also states that it believes in “a free and open debate in which different opinions can be expressed” and has criticized the “established media houses” in Sweden for “doing a bad job” and “abusing their position” because they fail to provide “a complete, correct and fact-based picture in important issues that are crucial for development in Sweden and for individual residents.”
The outlet had over 64,000 YouTube subscribers and its live streams often attracted tens of thousands of viewers on the video-sharing platform before it was taken down.
In a post discussing the takedown of its YouTube channel, SwebbTV wrote (Google Translate link):
“Today, it is quite clear that their [Google’s] purpose is to guide the discussion in society and to ban information that questions their agenda. Today it is, among other things, about the pandemic, the climate alarms and mass migration.”
SwebbTV previously had its YouTube channel temporarily purged on August 2, 2019. At the time of this takedown, the outlet said it had been given no prior warning from YouTube. The channel was restored on August 7, 2019 with YouTube admitting (Google Translate link): “We made the wrong call by removing the entire channel and have reinstated it.”
However, SwebbTV wrote that it has appealed the current channel takedown and that the appeal was rejected immediately.
The removal of SwebbTV’s channel follows YouTube placing increased restrictions on conversations about the coronavirus with many independent media outlets, public figures, and doctors being censored because of their criticism of masks, lockdowns, and vaccines.
