Versión Español
Spanish – It is no secret that President Donald Trump has fought a battle against the so-called mainstream media. Both Twitter and Facebook have had a considerable amount of disagreements with the president, which have even reached the US Senate. On the one hand, these platforms favored the Democrat Joe Biden, limiting the diffusion of the scandal that involves his son Hunter Biden with alleged traffic of influences and millionaire businesses with Chinese, Russians, and Ukrainians of dubious credibility. On the other hand, they also had to appear before the Senate for interference in the elections after repeatedly censoring the messages of the Republican and his team.
Now a new actor is added to the battle: YouTube. The most widely used video-playing platform on the planet set its sights on a particularly high point in public opinion this Wednesday.
We are talking about the censorship of complaints about the execution of alleged electoral fraud. Something that the Republican leader has interpreted as a violation of freedom of expression.
YouTube seeks to shield Biden
YouTube began to implement a new policy that seeks to remove all information that, according to the website, is ignoring Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. YouTube’s argument is the following:
On December 9, we started applying our Presidential Election Integrity policy (below) to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, meaning we remove content that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election uploaded on or after December 9. As we ramp up our enforcement, we’ll remove violative videos without giving a strike. We will begin issuing strikes for new content uploaded after Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021.
On Wednesday, the platform, which has been developed as a subsidiary of Google since 2006, was ruthless and said it would remove any videos that claim that widespread election fraud could have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
The YouTube ruling without an official proclamation
The decision made by YouTube comes after the deadline for states to resolve disputes over the results, also known as the “safe harbor date.” However, there are still open lawsuits. The most recent one is in the Supreme Court, driven by Texas, with the support of at least 17 Republican states.
In other words, there is no officially proclaimed winner in the U.S. elections. Only on December 14 will state voters cast their ballots in case the Texas-imposed lawsuit is not successful and no postponement occurs.
An action of this nature – clearly seen as a deprivation of freedom of expression – indicates that despite active demands and investigations into possible irregularities, the mainstream media is silencing the claims of Trump and the Republicans who echo them. Although the Supreme Court has the final word, YouTube has decided to take on the role of the highest court and, without a trial, issue a ruling.
The YouTube measures: A new favor for Biden?
The benevolence of the big media towards the former vice president has been notorious. They rigorously try to clean up his image. The most significant examples apply to all three major platforms: Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
Facebook and Twitter have brought their strategy to a point where the Senate had to intervene on what these companies were doing, particularly with respect to the censorship they applied to the dissemination of the New York Post article that revealed the allegedly million-dollar business of Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, with Russian, Chinese, and Ukrainian companies.
During the Democratic Convention in August, the political bias in favor of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign became apparent. The maneuver was detected in the alleged manipulation of numbers about the expressions “like” and “dislike” during the broadcast of the first two nights of that event.
According to reports by journalist Miguel Moreno of The Epoch Times, during the first night of the Democratic Party Virtual Convention, the three channels that broadcast live on YouTube exhibited one constant: the “dislikes” were equal to or even greater than the “likes.” Interestingly, by the next morning, these numbers had disappeared, and the balance was now tipping in favor of the likes.
The figures were eventually reversed to give the viewer the feeling that, in reality, the acceptance rates exceeded the disapproval rates.
The evidence presented by Moreno indicates that on Joe Biden’s official channel, there was a drop from 5800 “dislikes” to 3300 overnight. Meanwhile, on NBC‘s broadcast, the same pattern was verified, and the numbers went from 5100 “dislikes” to 2800 once the event was over.
