Aug. 22, 2023 - Epoch Times
11:30
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| Over this past weekend, YouTube introduced a new updated medical misinformation policy which will censor any medical content, or even more generally, any health-related content, which doesn't align with the claims that are coming out from the World Health Organization. | |
| You heard that right. | |
| If the unelected bureaucrats over in Geneva, Switzerland, who run the World Health Organization, if they decide that something is not true, then you, the common plebe right here in America, can no longer post a video saying anything to the contrary. | |
| And of course, it goes the other way as well. | |
| If those bureaucrats say something is true, well, you better not say that it isn't. | |
| And it's really worth mentioning that this new policy is not limited to COVID, and it's not limited to the COVID vaccine. | |
| But instead, this applies to all health and medical content on the entire platform. | |
| Now, if that sounds too ridiculous to be true, well, let's go through the directive together. | |
| To start with, beginning all the way back in the year 2022, YouTube maintained this webpage right here, titled COVID-19 Misinformation Policy. | |
| According to that page, quote, And indeed, if you happen to scroll down on that page, you would see a broad and comprehensive list of things that people were not allowed to discuss on the YouTube platform regarding COVID. However, something interesting happened over this past weekend. | |
| If you tried to access that particular COVID misinformation page, well, you found that it no longer existed. | |
| And instead, you were suddenly redirected to this page right here, the new and much more general medical misinformation policy. | |
| Here's specifically what it says. | |
| And notice as we're reading it that it is no longer confined solely to COVID. Quote, YouTube doesn't allow content that poses a serious risk of egregious harm by spreading medical misinformation that contradicts local health authorities or the World Health Organization's guidance about specific health conditions and substances. | |
| This policy includes the following categories, prevention misinformation, treatment misinformation, and denial misinformation. | |
| And then, right below that, they go a little bit deeper into what those three categories mean. | |
| The first one, titled Prevention Misinformation, says this, quote, And again here, please note that this is no longer limited to COVID, but instead, It's a general policy that applies to all health conditions and all vaccines. | |
| Now the second point here is treatment misinformation. | |
| Quote, Or that have been confirmed to cause severe harm. | |
| And then thirdly, there is denial misinformation. | |
| Which is a little bit ironic since I personally know several people who posted videos about their own personal health conditions after they took a specific medicine only to have that video be censored and their testimony get denied. | |
| Now, one of the strangest parts of this new misinformation policy update that came from YouTube was how the media across all of America decided to cover it. | |
| Almost as if it was coordinated, media outlets across the country presented this change as a way that YouTube was working to crack down on cancer treatment misinformation. | |
| Which, in a certain sense, is true. | |
| Cancer treatment misinformation would fall under the broad purview of this new guidance. | |
| And in fact, if you scroll down a little bit further on that medical misinformation page, YouTube does provide a list of examples of this misinformation, most of which, as you can see, relate to cancer treatments. | |
| However, for one, they make a special point to mention on that page that that list is not complete. | |
| And second of all, we just read through the actual updated policy. | |
| And this policy is very broad and general. | |
| It prohibits saying anything that contradicts either the World Health Organization and or the local health authorities like the CDC and the FDA. | |
| This policy is clearly not limited at all to simply cancer treatment misinformation, like those media headlines would lead you to believe. | |
| And also, it's worth mentioning that it's not limited to only the people who create videos, as this policy would also censor comments below the videos. | |
| These policies apply to videos, video descriptions, comments, live streams, and any other YouTube product or feature. | |
| Keep in mind that this isn't a complete list. | |
| Furthermore, they wrote here that this policy of theirs is subject to change at any time. | |
| Quote, Now, on the one hand, on the one hand, you have a plethora of media outlets touting this move one hand, you have a plethora of media outlets touting this move as a great win for stopping | |
| And to be fair, there is some truth to that, because YouTube does find itself in this precarious position since a lot of actual misinformation gets shared across its platform. | |
| And I believe that most people can agree that if someone is actually suffering from cancer, they go online to do some research, and they wind up getting completely misled by some random guy posting nonsense YouTube videos, which sound legit, but are actually based on nothing but his own imagination. | |
| He just knows how to make good videos. | |
| Well, that's not good. | |
| That can lead to actual real-world harm, as this policy states, such as by using gasoline, diesel, and kerosene as a form of treatment. | |
| And so, in this particular case, you can see the rationale for the censorship. | |
| You might not 100% agree with it, but at the very least, the rationale is there. | |
| But on the other hand, assigning some international organization all the way over in Europe as the arbiter of truth for what we here in America can and cannot discuss, well, that's censorship at its very finest. | |
| Since it suppresses the free flow of information, it sets up a quasi-governmental body to act as essentially the arbiter of truth, and also it assumes that such an organization is infallible, and definitely correct in their recommendations. | |
| For instance, here's how author Michael Schellenberger summed up the criticism of assigning the WHO and other local health agencies as the deciding factor for what's true or not. | |
| Quote, Imagine if YouTube had been around over the last 200 years. | |
| It would have banned criticisms of bloodletting, thalidomide, lobotomies, and sterilizing the mentally ill, all of which were recommended by official health authorities. | |
| Opposition to bad health and medical advice often comes from outside of the health and medical profession or from the fringes. | |
| To disallow criticism of the mainstream consensus is a recipe for gross abuses of power and is an attack on free speech, science, and democracy. | |
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| And now, let's head on back to the studio. | |
| And that, I believe, is the true heart of the matter. | |
| Not being able to discuss viewpoints that are contrary to the government is the very hallmark of a totalitarian system. | |
| Now, someone who advocates for this type of censorship, they might say that in this case, it's okay, since this is not some random political government agency. | |
| These are, after all, health agencies. | |
| They base their decisions on scientific evidence. | |
| However, the corollary to that argument is that that's not how these things work in practice, and that's not even really how science works. | |
| For instance, I myself have published episodes on this platform on YouTube which were taken down, even though in those episodes we did nothing more than go through the details of certain studies, as they relate to vaccines. | |
| Now those studies, they were peer-reviewed and they were published in actual scientific journals, and they added to the growing body of research in this field. | |
| However, those episodes were still taken down off of YouTube because whoever had their finger on the delete button over at YouTube HQ, they decided that it went against the guidance from the WHO. And that was that. | |
| Furthermore, another point to consider is that whether it's the WHO, the CDC, the FDA, as well as all the equivalent agencies in other countries, they are all, by their very nature, political agencies. | |
| The director of the WHO, he or she is selected by the different member states and then voted in by a United Nations subcommittee. | |
| The directors of the CDC, the NIH, and the FDA, they are all political appointees made by the president. | |
| And in fact, all three of those agencies, they sit underneath the Department of Health and Human Services, which is currently led by Mr. | |
| Javier Becerra, a political appointee who is, just for your reference, not a doctor, but rather a former lawyer. | |
| Now, that's not to say that just because those agencies are led by political appointees, they should be discounted entirely. | |
| But what it does reveal is the fact that these agencies, the ones that are now being used to censor Americans, are in fact political agencies. | |
| And so the censorship is, you might very well say, government censorship with a few extra steps. | |
| Regardless, what this means in practice is that, moving forward, we might really just have to stick to talking about the weather. | |
| Although, to be frank with you, it's only a matter of time before another misinformation policy is released regarding the climate, which makes talking about the weather also a dangerous topic of discussion. | |
| And so, if you'd like to read this misinformation policy for yourself, I'll throw a link to it. | |
| It'll be down in the description box below this video for you to check out. | |
| And lastly, I'd like to mention this. | |
| I mention this often, and I mean it every single time. | |
| If you are just sick and as tired of all this encroaching censorship as I am, well, you're in luck. | |
| Because the Epoch Times has recently extended its awesome sale on subscriptions. | |
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| And so, if you have not been sure about whether you want to subscribe to The Epoch Times or not, but you're 100% sure that you are completely fed up with all the censorship on all these different platforms, including this beautiful one here, well, consider trying The Epoch Times. | |
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| It's essentially, at least in my opinion, exactly what a news organization should be. | |
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| And so, if you've been looking for an honest source of news, I hope you consider trying the Epoch Times for yourself. | |
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| Click it before this channel is deleted altogether. | |
| And then, until next time, if there is a next time, I'm your host, Roman, from the Epoch Times. |
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