Substack’s TK News by Matt Taibbi put together a video showing Democrats and liberal pundits denying the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s 2016 election results and posted it to YouTube. You’d think that it would be fair game to create a montage simply showing what people actually said; but no, to YouTube, owned by tech giant Google (or is it Alphabet, who even knows anymore), that was grounds for immediate punishment. They halted paid advertising on the video, causing the creators to lose out on the revenue they hoped to earn.The video itself is a thing of beauty as it exposes the hypocrisy of Democrats and the liberal media who have droned on and on for years about the dangers of “election deniers.” Almost every left-leaning outlet lambastes those who believe in “The Big Lie” or espouse the “false claims” that there may have been issues with the 2020 presidential election.

And yet it’s often they themselves that are the Election Deniers. Watch:

Evidently, YouTube doesn’t want you watching the truth. The video-sharing site sent an email to producer Matt Orfalea:

Matt Taibbi on YouTube’s decision to demonetize the above video, saying it “isn’t suitable for all advertisers”: https://t.co/XFE5BPKnKT pic.twitter.com/pDMVMvR7MX

— Dirk Matter (@Dirk_Matter) September 29, 2022

Oh, that doesn’t sound like Big Brother. Taibbi responded on his Substack page:

I’d like to thank YouTube for making our point. The material in this video does not promote the idea that any election was stolen or illegitimate. On the contrary, it shows a great mass of comments from Democratic partisans and pundits who themselves make that claim, about the 2016 election. Those comments were not censored or suppressed when made the first time around, by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Karine Jean-Pierre, Adam Schiff, Rob Reiner, Tom Arnold, and Chris Hayes, among many others.

This is just the latest of YouTube’s efforts at shutting down viewpoints its woke staffers don’t like. Comedian and political commentator Russell Brand’s video was recently pulled over a small error; just the other day they scrubbed a 2019 pro-family speech by new Italian leader Giorgia Meloni; their censors yanked a black film director’s short film because it was critical of BLM… the list goes on. Sometimes YouTube reverses course after public outcry, but the damage has already been done.

As Big Tech continues to censor more heavily each day, people like Russell Brand, Glenn Greenwald, myself and others are flocking to @rumblevideo where free speech is not only allowed but encouraged. https://t.co/aYYbcclqS8

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) October 2, 2022

In this case, they had a change of heart after the publication of the Substack article, and reinstated the video with normal advertising:

A YouTube spokesperson said the decision was overturned after a review, following publication of the Substack article.

“This video was demonetized due to an error in our automated systems,” the spokesperson told The [New York] Post. Our systems are not perfect, and we encourage creators to appeal enforcement actions directly in YouTube Studio when they feel we got something wrong. Every appeal helps improve the accuracy of our enforcement over time.”

Note that the first email YouTube sent to the creators said the video was censored after a “manual review.” In their statement reinstating the montage, however, they blame “automated systems.” They can’t even get their story straight.

Should we just chalk it up to an honest error; you know, everyone makes mistakes sometimes? Unfortunately no, YouTube and other big tech outfits have long ago lost the benefit of the doubt. They simply didn’t want this information out there, and it was only the outcry and negative publicity that forced their hand. If these repeated episodes of censorship which occur on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram—virtually every social media site—are simply human errors, how come it never happens to liberal postings? Have you ever heard CNN’s Don Lemon complain he’s been muzzled? Have you ever read about the New York Times being concerned that their intensely left-wing propaganda disguised as opinion pieces are throttled? Nope. And you probably never will.

Taibbi puts it best:

Now we know: you can deny election results on a platform like YouTube as much as you want, you can even promise disruption, but drawing attention to such behavior angers the algorithm. It’s hard to imagine a better demonstration of the double-standard in content moderation.