YouTube has (“voluntarily” or otherwise) assumed the role of a private business entity that “supports elections.”
Google’s video platform detailed in a blog post how this is supposed to play out, in this instance, in the EU.
With the European Parliament (EP) election just around the corner, YouTube set out to present “an overview of our efforts to help people across Europe and beyond find helpful and authoritative election news and information.”
The overview is the usual hodgepodge of reasonable concepts, such as promoting information on how to vote or register for voting, learning about election results, etc., that quickly morph into yet another battle in the “war on disinformation.”
And what better way to “support” an election (and by extension, democracy) – than to engage in another round of mass censorship? /s
But YouTube was happy to share that in 2023 alone, it removed 35,000 videos uploaded in the EU, having decided that this content violated the platform’s policies, including around what the blog post calls “certain types of elections misinformation” (raising the logical question if some types of “election misinformation” might be allowed).
Hellbound and Down 