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).