The social media company says it carefully reviewed the content of the banned CN Live! episode; says it won’t be restored and that a strike will remain against CN—an impossible decision if the entire video was indeed carefully reviewed.
A screenshot of Greg Palast speaking on the CN Live! episode banned by YouTube.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
YouTube has rejected an appeal by Consortium News, has refused to restore an episode of CN Live! it banned and will maintain a week-long suspension and a strike against CN’s YouTube channel. With three strikes, CN Live! could have its channel, with hundreds of videos, deleted.
YouTube wrote:
| We have reviewed your appeal for the following content: |
| Video: CN Live! S2E26 Voter Suppression in Georgia – with Greg Palast |
| We reviewed your content carefully, and have confirmed that it violates our spam, deceptive practices and scams policy. We know this is probably disappointing news, but it’s our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all. |
| How this affects your channel |
|
YouTube’s statement that it “carefully” “reviewed” the episode is patently untrue. A careful review of the episode, which aired on Jan. 14, would have clearly demonstrated that the program was about voter suppression in the Jan. 5 Senate runoff elections in Georgia. It begins with a clip showing Trump supporters claiming voter fraud in the November election but after 1m19s goes on to refute that claim, reporting instead that voter suppression by Republicans had taken place in Georgia.
It is literally impossible that anyone at YouTube could have watched even ten minutes of the video and come to their conclusion. The YouTube-banned episode can be watched in its entirety here on Twitter:
CN Live! S2E26 Voter Suppression in Georgia – with Greg Palast https://t.co/91Hjn3kTRx
— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) January 15, 2021
YouTube said that Consortium News had violated this policy:
“Spam, deceptive practices and scams
Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S. 2020 presidential election is not allowed on YouTube.”
It appears that just reporting on claims that the 2020 election was stolen, without supporting those claims, is enough for either a YouTube algorithm or human reviewer to banish a video
Media outlets, including The New York Times, CNN and other mainstream media, when reporting on the 2020 election mention or show video of Donald Trump and his supporters making their claim of a stolen election before saying that the claim is untrue. In this story just four days ago, CNN showed a video clip of Trump saying the election was stolen. The report quoted Justice Clarence Thomas saying election fraud is real.
CNN and numerous television outlets repeatedly aired parts of Trump’s Jan. 6 speech in which he claimed the election was stolen. This is precisely the kind of reporting CN engaged in for about one minute of an hour-long program.
Consortium News‘ CN Live! had been planning a debate between a supporter and detractor of the claim that the election was stolen. Clearly that would bring a second strike against Consortium News.
It is a particular affront to imply that Consortium News has made YouTube an unsafe place for its viewers. YouTube should clearly not be engaged in censoring news reports on behalf of a U.S. political party, which now controls both houses of Congress and the White House. With this incident YouTube has clearly shown it is incompetent to carry out the task it should not have been given in the first place.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former UN correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London and began his professional career as a stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe
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I have been following Greg Palast for several years on Consortium News, winner of the 2015 I.F. Stone Medal from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. I followed I.F. Stone on factual content during the Vietnam War years, when he exposed US lies about that war. Censorship of Greg Palast, investigative reporter, by Youtube.com on Consortium News is a violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, and less truthful than any comment of our former President. I hope they file suit against you immediately to close down Youtube, who thinks it has a monopoly on what US citizens have a right to hear.
Consortium News is not a social media platform like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, which displays whatever a user posts. We are a publication, which is totally different. Everyday we get submissions from writers. As all publications do, we apply editorial standards to decide what we will accept for publication. Should we accept everything and dilute the quality of the publication for our readers? Of course not. It is not “censorship” for our editors to apply editorial standards. They have decades of experience in journalism. That’s why they were hired. So if we reject writers’ submissions to appear on our pages based on an editorial judgement, why shouldn’t we apply the same standards to comments? Like all serious publications we moderate every comment and publish the ones deemed worthy of publication. Automatically accepting every submitted article or comment would make us a social media platform, which we are not. It would dramatically change the character of Consortium News. Posting a comment here is in no way the same as posting a Tweet or a Facebook post even though people seem to think that it is.
Put all videos on Rokfin and tell all and sundry.
Google helped Hillary in the 2016 election and they would do the same for Biden.
Google is working to silence any sharing of information about the 2020 election because they helped ,make it happen.
Google is changing reality for the country. The odds that Biden won were ridiculously low. A lot of people know that but no one will hear and see the evidence, including our judicial system. That should give the country pause.
Google, others invested $256 million into CrowdStrike so Democrats can use FBI wiretap data to regain Congress
hXXps://brassballs.blog/home/google-paid-100-million-dollars-for-tech-startup-crowdstrike-to-illegally-use-fbi-data-to-elect-democrats?fbclid=IwAR2nSD0ssxXjZuRxXnwRp5JDozxB8WOyiAUB4yHp3q_jF4kFKOGzDxM4pA4
Anyone who believes that our national elections are free of fraud and manipulation by both parties is naive.
Within the brief, limited time period that is allowed to challenge results, proving when, where and how malfeasance has occured is nearly impossible.
Whichever party cheats in a particular election, gets away with it and wins, has no reason to challenge the existing electoral processes. The winning cheaters of both parties share a common contempt for the citizenry and are content to keep the electoral game rigged.
Youtube is fundamentally a corporatist promotional platform before anything else. Its content “protection” system and appeals process (laughable to even call it that) serve only to suppress and retard independent content creation and insulate established entities.
A well known and constantly abused scam is for certain channels to create throwaway music that use sound sources appearing in other original videos, then youtube flags the *original* videos for stealing content. Youtube has never done anything to curtail these scams from operating openly on their platform.
If google actually cared about “deceptive practices” then channels like PragerU would have been banned years ago. Yet they’re still going strong with almost 3 MILLION subscribers. compared to consortium’s just over 9,000. I feel that’s a pretty stark representation of the “safe place” youtube is cultivating.
The more we can get away from youtube, the better.
BitChute, Joe. Everyone has recognized by now that YouTube is now a government/Silicon Valley mouthpiece and worthless for honest content. It’s time is past.
It is completely naive for CN to think, given the content of what it has been reporting for the past five years, that they are somehow exempt from the new, improved “first they come for my neighbor” totalitarianism culture, and users need to start backing up all of their catalog.
CN needs to get off of YT! The cost of cloud server for hosting video is so low there is no excuse for CN to coddle censors and totalitarians. Silent consent is just enabling the inevitable. Remember Radio Netherlands? NOW would be a good time for CN to get out of the USA to a safer place for journalistic freedom, before 40 years of building the Perry legacy gets completely torched along with the rest of the US constitutional protections that are already long gone! Be PRO ACTIVE not RE ACTIVE!
In the meantime, get on LBRY and out of Silicon Valley!
Meanwhile, two and a half years ago…
hXXps://consortiumnews.com/2018/08/10/in-a-corporatist-system-of-government-corporate-censorship-is-state-censorship/
First they came for Snowden and Assange, then they came for Alex Jones…
But, vote suppression and manipulation has been around for a while.
Electronic voting needs to be banned, it’s just begging for abuse. 25 years ago the county in which I live wanted to go full touchscreen. When I asked where the actual back-up was if it went down the elections official held up a floppy disc and asserted that would suffice. No paper trail, just electrons. Did you ever try to hand count electrons? And that was before “The Internet of Things” mentality took hold. Heck, someone can hack your refrigerator now if they want to. Do you really think electronic voting isn’t ripe for the pickin’?
And, don’t get me started on ballot access laws…
Some people fear the Truth.
I join those who are asking for how to contact YouTube to strongly object to this obvious censorship. Please provide that info.
YouTube censorship is one thing but what about your webhost? Do you have a viable alternative if your host decides to take down your site out of nowhere? It is not unheard of.
Get free of Youtube.
I am not a computer nerd, but there must be a way.
Er…don’t watch? Try Mind, LiBRY, and others. When they censor “linux” I’m out.
Have you examined this site? hXXps://brandnewtube.com It could be a valid alternative for your present video site.
I use that regularly and I agree. Time to switch CN!
This is part of a nationally-coordinated effort to use monopoly power to remove all alternative viewpoints, and rather especially left-wing ones, from the social media platforms. It has the further purpose of suppressing competition for the MSM, this crippling their competition.
It’s essential that the Left develop its OWN social media and video streaming services; otherwise we’ll be wiped away.
It’s important for the left to support a public square that allows all views to be expressed. That is why we must support suppressed voices on the populist right in their struggle with the corporate oligarchs. There is absolutely zero chance the mainstream presstitutes and their corporate bosses will lend a sympathetic ear to real leftist sites like this one. Even the so-called left side of the Democratic Party is as far away from the anti-war, anti-identity politics, pro-class struggle, anti-authoritarian, real left as we are from the right side of the Republican Party. Both political parties are as corrupt and toxic as any human grouping can be at least in intention. We must recognize all forces struggling against the oligarchy as comrades.
Great comment, thanks.
You’re kidding of course. You honestly feel that left wing content is being targeted by Big Tech? How of earth did you come to that conclusion? Yes, just in the last few weeks far-left Antifa type commentary has been taken down and censored. But where have you been these past five years? Conservative “ right wing” not even far-right commentary has been harassed and censored mightily during this period. Have you not seen any of the material hijacked by Project Veritas for example. Which clearly shows Jack Dorsey and Zuckerberg openly speaking in zoom committee meetings about censoring right leaning political commentary. Wake up my friend. Now they’re coming for you. Welcome to the club.
Remember the similar attack on CN and 200 other websites, accused of spreading ”Russian disinformation” in 2016? Now YT has joined this campaign. There is a good article in the CN archives on this, Nov. 27th, 2016 by the late Robert Parry. (We still miss him very much!) The anonymous group of ”independent researches”, called PropOrNot had compiled the list of these suspicious sites. It was an honor for CN to make the list, showing that they are reporting really truthfully.
The media war has been in full swing ever since, becoming more and more fierce during the 2020 election campaign. The history will judge this phenomenon, in due time.
In that regard CN sued Canadian Global News and the government arm equivalent of the NSA. It’s still pending I understand but CN hasn’t reported on any update or outcome. Being a Canadian reader I’m very interested in any outcome in this matter. I’ve read nothing further about it in the Canadian either. The accusations were extremely laughable. Our CSIS department is likewise.
Where is the petition/open letter to sign?
There clearly gunning for you CN!
I think to maintain a presence on YouTube you just need to place the headlines and then a link to the content of your story to a noncensoring host site.
America the kool-aid! Sad but true.
Just tried to watch the vid (here in San Anselmo, CA 2/26/21 at 12:30 PM) — Twitter kyboshed the “Voter suppression in Georgia” vid. They stopped the film segment with an “error message” saying something went wrong and it’s not your fault” then suggested a live broadcast with a link. The “establishment” has quieted Twitter once again . . . Censorship is definitely on the march with the “Left” increasingly targeted . . .
And the right hasn’t been for at least the past five years.? You’re just getting a small taste. Read my comment above.
There has been a virtual blackout in the MSM of all stripes regarding Greg Palast’s lonely struggle to bring the real scandals regarding our elections to light for the past 20 years. It has been so effective that whenever I mention it in writing or orally the reaction is the same as if I had Q tattooed on my forehead and was on all fours barking. If all that this is about is the opening of your video showing precisely what the rest of the piece debunks, this will eventually be straightened out. If this is about what Mr. Palast had to say, which I did not see but can easily imagine because of my familiarity with him, this is obviously more than a truly stupid oops that has not gone to any level at which anyone actually knows excrement from apple butter. It is an effort to completely silence Mr. Palast, as opposed to thinking that ignoring him will continue to work its magic. Given that the Democrats were absurdly raving about not only Russian, but Chinese and Iranian interference before the election, but abandoned these ‘narratives’ (fictions) when Biden won, the entire thing is completely shameless. However, if YouTube refuses to reverse this soon, with an apology and without the need for court action, we have indeed taken another huge step into our Orwellian Brave New World that has been developing for so long.
Since You Tube is failing, I would recommend Consortium News, Greg Palast should probably move to RT (Russian Times). I follow Greg Palast, Thom Hartmann, Consortium news fairly closely and have not yet found any spam, deceptive practices or scams. Redactus Tonight move there some time ago and has reported several time how they do not interfere with their show at all.
RT stands for Russia Today another Russia Times. I watch and read their stuff daily. It’s wide ranging international news and regular commentators like Max Keiser are a must for anyone who wants to broaden their knowledge on world events and politics without the BS. It’s rather ironic in light of the perception of the majority of North American viewers. Thom Hartmann hasn’t appeared there now for years. Too bad. It was his choice to move on. Redacted Tonight is hands down funnier and more relevant than SNL or Colbert or Oliver could ever hope to be.
That is so unfortunate. I hope you permanently leave youtube and publish your live broadcasts elsewhere. It’s a travesty and YouTube don’t deserve our patronage.
To paraphrase Edward Snowden…When exposing a lie is treated as committing a lie, you are being ruled by liars. (though he used crime/criminals instead of lie/liars)
Good work, CN, for bringing this incident more into the open. Though maddening, it could be viewed as a badge of honor.
The use of “strikes” as a kind of cattle prod against those who would stray across the ever shifting fence of the “official lie(ne)” strikes me as a tad creepy given both its war-like and carceral associations. And the deployment of an obvious double standard by corpo-politico mouthpieces reeks of inbred impunity. Apparently they feel they can get away with most anything as long as they keep shrinking their users’ attention spans. Horrifyingly enough, the jury still seems to be out on that one.
That old saw about how power corrupts and absolute power absolutely also seems apt.
In an upside-down world maybe Lewis Carroll had it right. Shun the frumious Bandersnatch! (or bandwidth snatchers)
I don’t think there should be political censorship of any stripe.
Are you appealing elsewhere or is there an elsewhere?
Don’t you hear? YOUTUBE/GOOGLE have to start PAYING RUPERT MURDOCK fees from now on…….Imagine Murdoch gets “protection” money as it were, from Google! Murica!!!! Meanwhile NO AG investigation of all the stories of sexual predation at Fox News INc.
Even if those silly censor deciders were right and someone calls the election a fraud for real, it should not be censored and removed. That’s a slippery slope that in the end will be full fledged fascism, totalitarianism that will take a long time and many lives to overcome. Also, it’s called free speech, the first amendment, remember.
Welcome to 1984. It’s arriving.
And tons of people are consenting to it. The powers that be need that. Let’s wake them up.
And many people still wonder how Nazi Germany and now Fascist China came into being? It’s not a mystery at its core.
Top down censorship and indoctrination is a simple formula when it goes unchallenged on a wide enough scale.
I’d really like to see an election integrity expert like Bob Fitrakis, John Brakey, Bev Harris, etc. involved in any such debate about election fraud in 2020. I’ve seen some very disappointing dismissals of improbable exit poll discrepancies from progressives in 2020, almost all of which make a case for potential fraud in Trump’s favor (NOT Biden’s!). Greg Palast does great investigations on voter suppression but he quite frankly has a low understanding of how election fraud is accomplished and what evidence there has been for it.
“low understanding?” How much of Greg Palast’s work have you read? He’s the world’s expert on election fraud.
I read his recent book in its entirety. He dedicated all of a single page in it handwaving away the vulnerability of electronic voting and counting machines and dismissing evidence for vote alteration. He is very capable expert on voter suppression but he simply hasn’t done enough investigation on election fraud.
And during the 2016 primary fiascos, his fingers seemed to have been stuck in partisan glue remaining silent through all the Bernie campaign! It was only CN who (later after CNL came online) brought out interviews of Jared & Elee Beck, and Tim Canova.
I won’t even watch CNL anymore if I have to allow YT to load on my home computers! I stopped allowing these entities in my home about a year ago when the censorship went unrestrained.
YouTube replies that they ‘reviewed your content carefully’, but clearly this statement is untrue.
No question that we’re at risk of stumbling into a dystopian future…
Pretty sure they do not have professional journalists or political scientist PhD analysts working in their YT censorship department, unless you count the intel people sent in from the Forever War MICIMACS Uniparty!
The machine doesn’t want voter suppression to be highlighted I believe, hence censorship under false pretenses. That’s just my opinion.
Just ban youtube
One more reason I have never signed up for YouTube, or Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on.
Robert Parry and Gary Webb were real reporters.
hXXps://consortiumnews.com/2021/02/26/youtube-rejects-consortium-news-appeal/
At 80 I’ll finish out with books, newspapers and magazines made out of paper and the New Yorker and a few other news sites like CN online and in paper. I prefer my HCN and Mother Jones in paper also. and Utopia.
Posted here and sent on to a number of other folks
YouTube did review the entire video and reached the decision they wanted: to screw Consortium News. They will screw the left whenever and however they can, with or without a valid excuse, on the flimsiest of “evidence” or “reason.”
In a fascist state, like the USA, loyalty is more important than the truth; and dissent is treason. Soon YouTube will not even bother to lie. It will just censor the left arbitrarily.
The fascists want no thought, no diversity, no negotiation, no nothing that will challenge, even in the slightest, the totalitarian Washington narrative.
Not only that, they will take a fine tooth comb and start deleting all of their archives. The price of hard drives is CHEAP. Their are 80 TB drives available now that can back up gigantic volumes of video. Even the USB drives are cheap now. There is no excuse for CNL to lose its archive.
The Ministry of Truth will not be daunted by actual facts or evidence… Keep fighting, CN!
CN video journalism is valuable – what’s your backup plan if CN is removed from YouTube?
Joe Laurie,if there is any way I can help, please ask. (Unfortunately not with money). I fear it won’t be long now before social media start banning articles arguing that Navalny and Skripals were not poisoned with novichok or by Russia, Putin did not invade Ukraine and Crimea, Assad did not drop chemical bombs on his own people at Douma , Ukrainian Army is shelling its own defenceless civilians in their homes in Donbass, the West attempted unsuccessfully to unseat Lukashenko in Belarus by attempted violent street coup last July. You can see where this is going, Joe and readers .
How strange, the same video is on Greg’s site (without the CN live part) through You Tube. Their process appears to be very capricious and disorganized, as well as absurd. They pull it one place and leave it on another.
Since they rejected your appeal, they appear to have a problem admitting their mistake, and being caught acting like the Ministry of Truth in 1984.
The pain is searing through me.
Why post on youtube in the first place? There are other venues. Placing Consortiumnews videos on youtube just makes Google richer and more powerful.
And reaches many more people than other video platforms.
All alternative views to Corporate Woke are being cancelled, regardless of source, not just CN. CN’s divergence from the Russiagate hoax has put a bullseye on it, and the support for Assange and Snowden.
Not if they censor your videos. If your business is dependent on one platform, you don’t own your business.
If your Youtube page just contained links to the articles that were posted elsewhere, presumably their automatic censorship program would not react. And if they still gave you “strikes” — three strikes and you’re out? — then you would know it wasn’t a poor-quality algorithm, but a deliberate effort to dump CN, and you would have no alternative to abandoning the Googlesphere…
The techno-totalitarian corporate oligopoly has no legal obligation to allow free speech on their privatized chunk of electro-magnetic spectrum (which is supposed to be a public asset). Neither does the TV tabloid so-called “news”.
Besides, after the Citizens United case, corporations have the rights of human beings and money is defined as free speech. Elections Inc. in the US are now merely the world’s most expensive PR stunt. The Elections Inc. industry generates billions for DNC/RNC, the BigMediaCartel, advertising firms, marketing firms, consulting firms etc. etc.
Even before that, we had the so-called Electoral College and US Senate (House of Lords) that are obvious barriers to any democratic line of legitimacy.
Then we add more barriers: the voter purging, voter suppression, gerrymandering and other trickery…I believe we can safely conclude that the US is an oligarchy with a Public Relations Democracy facade.
A good small step would be to break up the monopolies and oligopolies. Is there any political will to do so when the techno-totalitarians serve the interests of the surveillance state? Or when the QE-inflated stock prices of these megacorps give them billions of slush money to bribe politicians with? (sorry, I forgot, we don’t call it “bribes” in the US, only in those “other” countries, we can substitute whatever Orwellian euphemism that seems fitting).
Jonny James, true. Thanks.
Lobbying walking around campaign money and implicit promises of lucrative future sinecures.
First they ignored…
Then they ridiculed…
Then they attacked…
And finally they banned…
The Independent Media
Well said, Mr. Bowles.
Youtube is clearly trying to manufacture consent for further censorship of you later. Strongly recommend you consider uploading CN videos to a PeerTube instance (or even host your own). Everyone here watches your videos from their embed on consortiumnews.com anyway.
But those videos seen on consortiumnews.com are stored on YouTube’s server, not ours. Moving an archive of hundreds of videos to another platform is not as simple an undertaking as it may seem.
PeerTube software has a neat “Import with URL” feature that lets you grab videos at their highest quality from other video hosting sites. It’s not quite a simple clone-everything-at-once button, but it’s something at least. If Youtube finally decides some day to suspend your account all those archives will be lost anyway. In the mean time you could consider mirroring new stuff on an alternative video host as a failsafe in the event Google tries to shut down an important breaking news story.
We have our entire video archive backed up on multiple external hard drives.
Lots of the audio also archived on libsyn.com/ but only through mid 2020. Hope the rest get uploaded, including this last episode!
Yes. The Duran for example has their materials on Rumble, Bitchute, LBRY/Odysee, and more!
Stop using YouTube.
I strongly advise you to find out how, and start to download all your videos. It must be possible. Someone could do it for a fee and burn it onto DVDs, or a onto a hard drive or something like that. I and others would help support that.
We already have our entire video archive backed up on hard drives.
Actually it is very easy and can be done in one week with enough laptops! They can all be re-recorded! Hire the local community college IT department or computer repair shops to do it. Users should record their favorite interviews now.
CNL maybe ask ACLU lawyers to file a lawsuit for YT breach of contract, to get control of your property.
We have control over the video. Every video we have is backed up on multiple hard drives. Please do not put out misleading information that it will take only a week to transfer our archive to a new platform.
In honor of Robert Parry (I have three of his books), I just want to say:
~
I don’t think YouTube has a clue who they are “messing” with.
~
If you study hard, that statement is obvious.
~
I believe we have entered a moment of “fighting the good fight” and the beauty is, no bullets need to fly…..the bigger beauty is that finally, at the end of the day, this witless repression will backfire so potently, that there will be no denying the ignominy, and then….
~
The truth will be revealed!
~
Consider me an ongoing contributor if any of this gets to the courts. I hope a better magistrate will be wise in any decision they make, but if it goes to the top, and the 1st Amendment is not protected, well then, it is obvious isn’t?
~
Peace,
Ken
My thoughts exactly.
This internet censorship of unapproved news sources and reporting began years ago but has been ramped up by order of magnitudes in the last year. But it is not the stealth popular-thought control device that those who wield it believe it is. It is transparent and transparently fraudulent. And, in the context of the ongoing and seemingly never ending decline of our society, it WILL backfire. I believe that. Because the contrast between our lived experiences and the obvious falsehoods in the approved messaging is stark and immediate…except to the geniuses doing the censoring, who cannot see from their yachts that they are no longer fooling us.
What once seemed dangerous to me now seems to hilarious. Pop the popcorn and watch them fail.
George Orwell warned us. We just didn’t wanted to listen.
Orwell’s prognosis warned about totalitarian, fascist government. What Orwell did not foresee, or account for, was that much of his extrapolation would come about, but in the service of business, plutocracy, neoliberalism, unregulated fascist gangster-capitalism and reckless consumerism. Our experience is not quite the Soviet police state he described; our experience is all business and consumerism. The pigs of Animal Farm turned out to be the free-market neoliberals of the Chicago school. I think people listen to Orwell, but many get it wrong anyway. I hear people say “Big Brother” and “group-think” and “1984” all the time. But, they think it refers to somebody other than themselves and their current condition. They think it is entertainment; which shows the triumph of free-market consumerism.
Great comment J Joon. Thanks
J Joon Excellent analysis of the sorry state we are in.