Independent journalist Tim Pool has had his video reporting on Pinterest’s secret internal blacklists and blocklists removed by YouTube. This follows Twitter and YouTube censoring Project Veritas’s original investigative report which exposed Pinterest’s censorship and Pinterest firing the employee who provided leaked documents that were the subject of this report to Project Veritas.
The original report from Project Veritas revealed that the visual search engine Pinterest was using internal blacklists and blocklists to suppress Christian, conservative, and pro-life content on its platform. Tim Pool summarized the findings of this report in a video titled “Pinterest Caught Censoring Conservatives, But Its Worse Than You Think” which he uploaded to YouTube on June 12.
Now the video has been removed from YouTube and according to Pool, he wasn’t given any warning or option to appeal.
One of Project Veritas’s tweets linking to this report and the original video report were both removed by Twitter and YouTube for supposed privacy complaints and violations. It’s likely that Pool’s video has been removed for the same reasons with the link to his video showing the following message:
“This video is no longer available due to a privacy claim by a third party.”
The grounds for this privacy complaint are probably Pool showing internal Pinterest messages from the business collaboration tool Slack and the names of Pinterest employees in his video. These same Slack messages are believed to be the reason Project Veritas’s tweet was taken down and showing the name of a Pinterest employee is the reason Project Veritas’s YouTube video was taken down.
Showing internal messages like these is necessary for undercover reporting so if this is the reason for the takedown, it’s problematic and yet another example of questionable tactics being used by big tech to suppress this report which exposes Pinterest’s censorship.
Pool has reached out to YouTube about the situation but hasn’t yet received a response.
Pool’s video is still available on BitChute, an alternative to YouTube that supports free speech and is becoming increasingly necessary in the wake of the mass censorship we’ve seen on YouTube since it introduced new “hate speech” rules following a pressure campaign from Vox host Carlos Maza and other legacy media outlets.
This isn’t the first time Pool has experienced YouTube censorship. His video about a drag kid family being investigated by child protective services was also temporarily taken down after multiple fake copyright claims were filed against it. However, in this instance, YouTube did rectify the mistake and restore Pool’s video shortly after it was removed.
