YouTube has deleted an episode of the Quoth the Raven podcast titled “The Conspiracy Theory Episode” which features Cornell professor Dave Collum for supposedly violating its “hate speech” policy.
The podcast covered many conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein, the Las Vegas shooting, Pizzagate, 9/11, JFK, and others. According to Quoth the Raven, it was the most popular episode of the podcast to date and many fans commented on Twitter about how much they loved the podcast.
https://twitter.com/qtrresearch/status/1152810609328689153
However, a few days after it was posted, YouTube decided that this episode violated its “hate speech” rules and removed the video. As with many of the “hate speech” violations we’ve seen since this updated policy rolled out, it’s not clear which part of the podcast YouTube deemed to be “hate speech.”
https://twitter.com/qtrresearch/status/1153981587530366977
One thing that makes this takedown particularly ironic is that one of the first discussion points in the podcast was political correctness and how people are tired of walking on eggshells with Collum saying: “No one wants to be told that they’ve offended someone because they used the wrong word.”
Host Christopher Irons has responded to the removal of the episode from YouTube by saying that he couldn’t find anything that could possibly be misconstrued as “hate speech” and said that YouTube’s double standards are getting a little ridiculous at this point. He also questioned why mentioning certain topics such as building 7 or trans people is seemingly forbidden on YouTube.
The removal of this podcast episode comes after YouTube has updated its policies numerous times this year to crack down on what it deems to be “borderline content,” “hate speech,” and content that questions public violent incidents. The common thread among these changes is that they all have clauses that limit the discussion of historic events, especially when that discussion questions the official narrative.
For example, when YouTube announced that it was “reducing recommendations of borderline content” in January, one of the examples of “borderline content” it provided was “blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.” Another example is the history channel Mr Allsop History having many videos documenting Nazi history removed because YouTube decided they were “hate speech.”
While the podcast is gone from YouTube, it’s still available on iTunes, Podbean, and Vimeo.
