Google-owned video behemoth YouTube, facing increased competition from platforms that are friendlier to free speech including Rumble and Twitter, has dropped a policy responsible for the widespread censoring of conservative voices. It is now possible to dispute the results of the 2020 election on YouTube.
Stressing the need to allow people to “openly debate political ideas,” YouTube said it will “stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections.”
Google boss Sundar Pichai is masked up ( Drew Angerer /Getty)
However, Google stressed that its election misinformation policies remain in place for future elections.
“All of our election misinformation policies remain in place, including those that disallow content aiming to mislead voters about the time, place, means, or eligibility requirements for voting; false claims that could materially discourage voting, including those disputing the validity of voting by mail; and content that encourages others to interfere with democratic processes.”
The tech company also boasted that it is tipping the scales in favor of the corporate legacy media, by ensuring that “see content from authoritative sources prominently in search and recommendations.”
Breitbart News has previously exclusively revealed YouTube’s search blacklist file, which allowed the company to manually intervene in politically charged search results to boost the visibility of its handpicked channels.
The blacklist, called a “smoking gun” by one Google whistleblower, was at times adjusted in response to complaints from the corporate legacy media.
While YouTube has been careful not to make any policy change that will hinder its ability to censor users around the upcoming presidential election, its relaxing of policies around discussion of 2020 election fraud comes in an environment of increased competition from free speech friendly platforms.
Twitter, which has unbanned several prominent conservatives under Elon Musk, recently allowed users to begin uploading longform videos. Musk recently personally intervened to override the decision of the company’s “trust and safety” team to censor Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman documentary, a move that was followed by the resignation of the platform’s top censor.
Rumble, a free speech platform that has attracted a number of conservative companies and individuals, is also going from strength to strength, recently poaching a major gaming creator from the Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch.
While it is not a video platform, Substack has also become a powerful force in social media, providing a major source of revenue for independent writers.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.