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YouTube takes down second Rand Paul COVID video and suspends him from posting
for a week
Emily Brooks
Tue, August 10, 2021, 5:39 PM·2 min read
In this article:
Sen. Rand Paul is fuming after YouTube censored the second one of his videos
for violating community guidelines on COVID-19 and suspended him from posting
more videos for a week.
“They are now banning all my speech, including speech that is given on the
Senate floor, which is protected constitutional,” the Kentucky Republican
senator told reporters on Tuesday. “YouTube now thinks they are smart enough
and godly enough that they can oversee speech, even constitutionally
protected speech.”
YouTube last week removed a video of an interview the Kentucky Republican
senator did on Newsmax.
Paul discussed his suspicions about the origins of the coronavirus, his feud
with Anthony Fauci over what funding for research in China’s Wuhan lab came
from the United States, and argued that most face coverings do not help stop
the spread of the virus.
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Paul, an eye doctor, then recorded, and on Aug. 3 uploaded, a second video
chastising YouTube for taking down the video and promoted one of its
competitors, Rumble. He defended his comments on masks.
“Saying cloth masks work, when they don’t, actually risks lives, as someone
may choose to care for a loved one with COVID while only wearing a cloth
mask. This is not only bad advice but also potentially deadly
misinformation,” Paul said in the video.
YouTube responded by taking down that video as well, saying that it violated
YouTube’s community guidelines. On Tuesday, Paul’s office said that the
company imposed a seven-day ban from posting more videos.
YouTube did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This is not the first time Paul has faced censorship from YouTube. In 2019,
the company took down a video that the senator uploaded in which he mentioned
on the Senate floor the name of the alleged whistleblower, whose concern
about former President Donald Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president led
to his first impeachment.
Paul acknowledged that YouTube, as a private company, has a right to ban them
if they want to but said that YouTube is acting as “an arm of the government
without any repercussions or push back.”
“It is really anti-free speech, anti-progress of science, which involves
skepticism and argumentation to arrive at the truth,” Paul said. “YouTube and
Google, though, have become an entity so huge that they think they are the
arbitrator of truth.”