OPINION | This article contains the author's opinion.
The censorship of big tech is out of control.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was censored by YouTube for comments he made about masks.
“YouTube said the video violated their policy because of my comments on masks,” Senator Paul stated in the now-deleted response video.
“They don’t allow videos that contradict government’s guidance on COVID,” Paul added.
Paul added that being banned by YouTube a “badge of honor.”
Paul said, “Leftwing cretins at Youtube banning me for seven days for a video that quotes two peer-reviewed articles saying cloth masks don’t work.”
In addition to being a senator in Congress, Paul is also a physician and has held his medical license for nearly 30 years since 1993.
“Censorship by YouTube is very dangerous as it stifles debate and promotes groupthink where the ‘truth’ is defined by people with a political agenda,” Senator Paul said.
“I’m not sure when YouTube became an arm of the government, and I’m not really sure it’s good for journalism to also be an arm of the government without any repercussions or push back,” Senator Paul said.
“As a libertarian-leaning Senator, I think private companies have the right to ban me if they want to, but I think it is really anti-free speech, anti-progress of science, which involves skepticism and argumentation to arrive at the truth,” Senator Paul said. “We realize this in our court systems that both sides present facts on either side of a question and complete an adversarial process to reach the truth in each case.”
“Journalism isn’t far from that and in some ways, the adversarial part of the courtroom is ideally what you would find in journalism, where both sides would present facts, there is a period of argumentation and people figure out the truth for themselves,” he said. “YouTube and Google though, have become an entity so huge that they think they are the arbitrator of truth.”
“I will try to channel my anger, not in breaking these companies up but by publicly expressing my disagreement with them and publicly promoting other channels that offer free speech alternatives,” he said.