It is the summer of 2023, and almost as soon as another dramatic global crisis (the war) hit the world, coronavirus pulled off a magic trick and disappeared – with most restrictions and mandates disappearing with it.
And yet, it still “lives” on powerful online platforms, as an effective means and excuse to employ censorship of what should in any democratic country be legal and protected speech.
Australia has been among those who embarrassed themselves the most by imposing draconian measures against citizens and non-citizens for years, but now that the measures are lifted, the political mood seems to be to pretend they never happened.
Not if new member of parliament in Australia’s state of New South Wales (NSW), John Ruddick, has something to say about it. And he does – but the question now is, how many people will hear it, considering that YouTube has decided to censor his very first speech delivered in the legislature.
As far as YouTube’s censorship is concerned, time stopped sometime in 2020 – the platform still uses the phrase “medical misinformation” to tell victims of censorship why their voices are being stifled – and little, if anything else by way of explanation (something similar has recently happened to elected representatives in the EU).
The “misinformation” Roddick allegedly spread in his address last Wednesday was in line with him disagreeing as early as 2021 with the way his own party, the Liberal Democrats, chose to deal with the pandemic.
Now, he told the parliament, New South Wales had turned itself into an “authoritarian Covid police state,” while enacting “(Covid) vaccine extremism” – despite the fact, he believes, this was a new, insufficiently tested vaccine.
Nevertheless, people were ordered to receive it, and multiple times, or face radical disruptions to their professional and personal lives.
How Roddick even expected his freely expressed stances such as – “NSW Health published weekly data (shows), the fewer vaccines you had, the less likely you went to hospital or ICU. The fatality rate was similar for the vaxxed and the unvaxxed” – to stay up on YouTube is a question in and of itself.
And it didn’t. As of this time, it is still accessible on the party’s own account on YouTube, and on Twitter, where it probably has a higher likelihood of survival.
“We’re obviously very disappointed that YouTube feels the need to censor something not only from NSW Parliament but as time-honored as a maiden speech, but we also oddly must thank them as we’ve benefited from the Streisand effect,” said the party, referring to the video raking in nearly a quarter million views on Twitter alone, in a short amount of time.
