Russell Brand Scorches YouTube for Misinformation Double Standard
British comic praises free speech alternative Rumble, slams YouTube hypocrisy
It’s clear Big Tech’s battle against so-called “misinformation” isn’t genuine.
Your first clue?
ABC’s “The View” posts its content on YouTube week after week without any Big Tech fallout. The show is rife with misinformation, but Team YouTube doesn’t lift a finger to stop it.
It’s hardly the only mainstream media outlet peddling false information.
How about every news source which declared the Hunter Biden laptop story misinformation two years ago based on … nothing?
Why haven’t you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story? Read more in this week’s newsletter➡️ https://t.co/CJesPgmGvo pic.twitter.com/jAi7PnpbZf
— NPR Public Editor (@NPRpubliceditor) October 22, 2020
That blazing hypocrisy fires up Russell Brand, the socialist turned red-pilled podcaster. The bawdy Brit’s YouTube channel, nearing 6 million followers, routinely shreds both Big Tech and the mainstream press.
This week it got personal.
Brand suffered a YouTube strike after he admittedly misinterpreted official NIH data regarding COVID-19. Brand and co. offered a follow-up apology video to correct the record.
It didn’t help.
YouTube took down the original video. Brand, in response, removed the subsequent apology clip and vowed to share more content on Rumble. The platform offers a free speech alternative to YouTube, owned by Google.
The bigger issues remain, and Brand tackled them with his singular wit.
“Why are big media organizations not censored for misinformation in the same way? Is it because YouTube are part of the mainstream media?” Brand asked.
“We have a responsibility to make sure the information we convey is absolutely 100 percent as accurate as we could be,” he said. He didn’t shirk away from his role in the NIH mistake, although his admission proved more transparent than many news outlets.
The YouTube “strike” rattled Brand, in part, because he sees a glaring double standard afoot.
“It looks like censorship because the mainstream media misinformation is up all the time,” he said, cueing up Rachel Maddow of MSNBC fame describing how effective the COVID-19 vaccines were upon their initial release.
We later learned that information was untrue. The vaccines offer some help, some protection, but not as much as the vaccine producers (and the media) told us.
“Isn’t that cast iron, rock solid misinformation?” he asked of the clip. Brand didn’t blame Maddow, but he wondered why that video is still allowed to thrive on YouTube.
“Is there one standard for independent news broadcasters like us on our channel, and a different standard for what we would call the mainstream media?” he said. “Is it possible that YouTube … now dances to the tune of the mainstream media, to the tune of the establishment? Certainly in this instance it would seem like it.”
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He then suggested YouTube props up mainstream media channels to the detriment of indie news sources.
He flashed a FAIR statistic stating 83 of the top 100 YouTube news channels hail from corporate media platforms. Is that a sign of the synergy, and strength, of entrenched platforms? Or is YouTube placing its digital thumb on the scale to benefit them?
Brand brings up good questions, but one topic isn’t open for debate.
Indie content providers face YouTube censorship on a regular basis. Think Dr. Drew Pinsky, Nick Di Paolo, Steven Crowder and others. Radio titan Dennis Prager is in near-constant battle with YouTube over his PragerU channel.
When was the last time ABC, The Washington Post or other outlets complained of similar strikes?
Brand and his near-6 million followers would like to know.
“Why are independent channels being attacked, censored and brought down, while mainstream media channels are being pushed, highlighted and celebrated?” Brand asked.