Canadian conservative outlet Rebel News has been suspended from uploading, posting or live streaming on YouTube for one week over a three month old video about censorship.
Rebel Media has 1.45 million subscribers on the platform.
The video they were suspended for was ironically titled “If Big Tech can silence Trump, they can silence anyone”.
“This comes after YouTube’s decision last month to demonetize us (to ban all ads and donations). That knocked a $400,000 hole in our annual budget,” Rebel founder Ezra Levant said in a statement about the suspension. “I’m worried that YouTube plans to completely shut us down within weeks. (And I know a certain Canadian prime minister who would like that to happen before he calls an election.)”
Rebel has published 15,000 videos on YouTube in the last six years, without ever before receiving a strike or suspension.
Levant noted that YouTube claims that video violates their “election-related misinformation policy.” That policy reads in full:
“Don’t post content on YouTube if it fits any of the descriptions noted below: Presidential Election Integrity: Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of any past U.S. presidential election.”
Rebel Media countered that “our video just didn’t do that. It wasn’t about election fraud at all — it was about Big Tech banning Trump from social media. The closest that video comes is showing Trump’s short video message telling Capitol Hill protesters to go home. But showing that video can’t be the problem — that exact same Trump video is currently on dozens of other YouTube news channels, such as CNN.”
