YouTube’s Policy on COVID-19 and Climate Change Sets Dangerous Precedent

Vijay Jayaraj | Posted: Apr 26, 2020 12:01 AM

https://townhall.com/columnists/vijayjayaraj/2020/04/26/youtubes-policy-on-covid19-and-climate-change-sets-dangerous-precedent-n2567584

YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki‎ has declared that they will “remove any content that goes against WHO recommendations” on the coronavirus pandemic, essentially censoring any opinion other than that of the World Health Organization.

This is not the first time YouTube has censored information with which it disagrees. Last year, the online streaming site said it would censor videos that do not agree with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s exaggerated claims about global warming.

This move by YouTube sets a dangerous precedent for censorship and has the potential to restrict the flow of information from competing sources—something that has been essential to the discovery of both truths and falsehoods and so to the growth of knowledge.

If anything, YouTube should be cautious of WHO, and not the other sources. It was WHO that made big blunders.

In January, WHO declared that COVID-19 was not transmittable from humans to humans. WHO relayed the same information on its website, YouTube, and Twitter.

WHO tweeted, “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.”

Three months down the line, the world finds itself in the midst of a catastrophic pandemic driven by human-to-human transmission.


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