YouTube removed a video on the Newsmax TV channel featuring an interview of President Trump. The Google-owned platform claimed that the video violated its community guidelines.
After his acquittal by the US senate, former president Trump was back in the limelight after weeks of silence. He featured in an interview on Newsmax, a right-leaning media outlet. Newsmax uploaded the interview on its YouTube channel. However, the February 17 phone interview on Greg Kelly Reports, was removed from the Google-owned video sharing platform for violating community guidelines.
“We have clear Community Guidelines that govern what videos may stay on YouTube, and we enforce our Community Guidelines consistently, regardless of speaker and without regard to political viewpoints,” YouTube said in a response to being questioned on why Trump’s interview was removed. “In accordance with our presidential election integrity policy, we removed this video from the Newsmax TV channel.”
The policy cited was added towards the end of last year. While launching the policy, Google said it would begin removing “content that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.”
In the interview, Trump continued his claims that the election was rigged. However, in an example of Big-Tech’s inconsistent implementation of policies, Trump’s interview on Fox, where he made the same claims is still live on YouTube.
Like all other Big-Tech platforms, YouTube purged Trump in the aftermath of the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. It initially suspended the Donald J. Trump channel on January 12, and announced it would continue censoring the channel on January 26. The platform is yet to lift the suspension on the former president’s channel, which had about 2.8 million subscribers.
In the Newsmax interview, Trump said he was considering launching his own social media platform, saying “we’re negotiating with a number of people, and there’s also the other option of building your own site.
Trump also said he was thinking of joining Parler, but is not sure the platform, which recently relaunched after being forced offline by Amazon’s web-hosting service, can handle the traffic he would bring to the site.
Meanwhile, Parler said the former president is welcome to the site. “If Donald Trump wants to come here and participate in free speech, he would be welcome on the platform,” Parler’s interim CEO Mark Meckler said in an interview on Fox News.
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