Friday, November 18, 2022

[Google blocked this post] "Election Denial" for Me, But Not for Thee: YouTube Censors TK-Produced Videos, Again, Despite Factual Accuracy

In late September videographer Matt Orfalea made a pair of videos for TK. One, Memory Holed: “The Election Was Hacked,” seen above, was a simple montage of Democratic politicians, media officials, and enforcement officials saying the 2016 election was, among other things, “illegitimate,” “rigged,” “hacked,” and a “cyber 9/11.”

The second, Memory Holed, Part II: The “Rigged” Election, was a similar exercise, with one exception: it compared the post-2020 statements of Donald Trump to the post-2016 statements of Democratic partisans. When Trump tells Chris Wallace, “I have to see,” when asked if he’d concede an election, Orfalea shows Hillary Clinton saying, “No, I would not,” when asked in 2017 — after her loss — if she’d contest the results. He shows Trump later saying he’ll of course respect the results, “if I win,” and Hillary Clinton saying Joe Biden should not concede “under any circumstances,” essentially exact analogs.


YouTube’s letter complaining about lack of “EDSA”
YouTube initially tried to demonetize both videos. After a fuss they reversed the decision about the first. Now they’ve taken a more drastic step, not only deleting the second video but two earlier rough-cut versions that were never even shown to the public but lived on his site. (This is another mad feature of the content moderation era: you can be censored and punished for pre-publication thinking). They also gave Orfalea a strike, leaving him two away from being removed from the site, which would essentially put him out of business.