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Sen. Rand Paul won’t be posting on YouTube for the next seven days after the mammoth video platform banned him over a post questioning the efficacy of masks on Tuesday.
YouTube told CNN the ban was a “first strike” in their “three strikes policy,” while denying that any political consideration was taken.
“This resulted in a first strike on the channel, which means it can’t upload content for a week, per our longstanding three strikes policy. We apply our policies consistently across the platform, regardless of speaker or political views, and we make exceptions for videos that have additional context such as countervailing views from local health authorities.”
The Kentucky lawmaker fired back in a tweet, calling the ban a “badge of honor.”
“A badge of honor . . . leftwing cretins at Youtube banning me for 7 days for a video that quotes 2 peer reviewed articles saying cloth masks don’t work,” Paul wrote, adding that the video is available on a different platform.
Over the past several months Paul has been a skeptic of the effectiveness of masks and has clashed with Dr. Anthony Fauci over the issue, including a pointed exchange in March where Fauci insisted that “Masks are not theater, masks are protective.”
Also on Tuesday, Twitter temporarily suspended Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green from posting after she tweeted that the coronavirus vaccines are “failing.”
Both Twitter and YouTube, along with fellow social media giant Facebook have come under scrutiny throughout the pandemic for their censorship rules.
Last month, asked what his message was to Facebook regarding the hosting of Covid “misinformation,” President Biden replied, “They’re killing people,” before walking the statement back, saying he meant the people posting, not the platform itself.
The White House has been working with Facebook and other tech companies to “flag” and limit and the spread of what it claims is dangerous misinformation surrounding the virus.
Republicans have alleged that the companies show ideological bias in their posting rules, pointing not just to Covid but to the ban on former President Donald Trump instituted by both Twitter and Facebook after the capitol riot, as well as suppression of the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop series.
In May, Facebook reversed a decision to ban posts claiming that the coronavirus emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China after government officials began to come around to the possibility and the Biden Administration launched an investigation.
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