Why is YouTube so afraid of free speech?

On Sunday, the hosts of Trigger–nometry, a YouTube show, posted an interview they’d done with Peter Hitchens. They labelled it ‘Lockdown is a catastrophe’, which is an accurate summary of the journalist’s view. Over the next 24 hours, instead of generating tens of thousands of hits, which their interviews normally do, it got very few. Why? The hosts got out their laptops and discovered that when they searched for the video on YouTube or Google, its parent company, it didn’t come up. That wasn’t a technical hitch. On the contrary, it’s a tried-and-tested method that YouTube and Google employ to suppress traffic to material they regard as suspect. It’s a form of censorship known as ‘shadow banning’.

This isn’t the first time YouTube has tried to silence critics of the official response to the pandemic. A couple of weeks ago, it removed an interview with Dr Knut Wittkowski, former head of epidemiology at Rockefeller University, and it also took down an interview with Professor Karol Sikora, dean of Buckingham University Medical School (later reinstating it). Last week, it removed an interview clip I had posted on my own YouTube channel entitled ‘The case against lockdowns’. The other person in that video was the Stanford professor Michael Levitt, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. What’s going on?

Apparently YouTube now has a policy of censoring any talking heads, no matter how distinguished, who dissent from Covid orthodoxy. This was announced by the company’s CEO Susan Wojcicki on CNN on 19 April. In an interview on Reliable Sources, she said YouTube would remove any information about the virus it regarded as ‘problematic’: ‘Anything that would go against World Health Organisation recommendations would be a violation of our policy.’