Although if they got banned during the start of covid during the Trump administration then we're talking about 5 years.
https://x.com/cidrap/status/1420482621696618496 ("Our Osterholm Update podcast episode (Jul 22) was removed for “medical misinformation.”" (2021))
Most ironic thing I've ever seen. I still recall it perfectly, though it's been four years. Never, ever trust censorship algorithms or the people who control them: they are just dumb parrots that suppress all discussion of an unwanted topic, without thought or reason.
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/managing-harmful-vaccin...
From the two links in the post, Google fleshes it out in great detail, with many examples of forbidden thought.
This seems like good banning to me. Anti-vaxxer propaganda isn't forbidden thoughts. It's bad science and lies and killing people.
That's the bit people miss. You can spout all the baseless nonsense you want, until it starts hurting people. Vaccine lies kill people.
Shouting "Fire" in your own home is fine, shouting it in a crowded theater and getting babies trampled to death is not.
If somebody says it, they not only don't care about free speech, they don't even care about having a good faith conversation about free speech. They've probably been told this before, and didn't bother to look it up, just repeated it again. Wasting good people's time.
The J & J vaccine was approved at the time, but was later banned for causing chronic health effects.
> claims that vaccines do not reduce transmission or contraction of disease
Isn't that true of the covid vaccines? Originally, the proponents claimed that getting the vaccine would stop you from getting covid entirely, but later on, they changed the goal posts to "it will reduce your symptoms of covid".
I know that some services do this in addition to account ban.
Edit: It's a weird time to be alive when we celebrate being willingly ignorant.
Edit 2: Also, I am tired of the fact that the entire right has been inoculated against facts yet they hate on vaccines. Lol.
Thank God Republicans are fighting against censorship. Without their efforts people might have gotten banned for posting actual Charlie Kirk quotes following his recent, tragic death.
This actually surprised me because I thought (and maybe still think) that it was Google employees that led the charge on this one.
For Google now to pretend Biden twisted their arm is pretty rich. They'd better have a verifiable paper trail to prove that, if they expect anyone with a memory five years long to believe it.
Banning Nazis has worked well so far. We should keep that up.
We also tried letting the propaganda machine full-blast those lies on the telly for the past 5 years.
For some reason, that didn't work either.
What is going to work? And what is your plan for getting us to that point?
If 'silencing people' doesn't work- so online platforms aren't allowed to remove anything? Is there any limit to this philosophy? So you think platforms can't remove:
Holocaust denial? Clothed underage content? Reddit banned r/jailbait, but you think that's impermissible? How about clothed pictures of toddlers but presented in a sexual context? It would be 'silencing' if a platform wanted to remove that from their private property? Bomb or weapons-making tutorials? Dangerous fads that idiotic kids pass around on TikTok, like the blackout game? You're saying it's not permissible for a platform to remove dangerous instructionals specifically targeted at children? How about spam? Commercial advertising is legally speech in the US. Platforms can't remove the gigantic quantities of spam they suffer from every day?
Where's the limiting principle here? Why don't we just allow companies to set their own rules on their own private property, wouldn't that be a lot simpler?
That "and/or" is doing a lot of work here. There's a huge difference between government censorship and forcing private companies to host content they don't want to host on servers they own.
Then again, Alphabet is now claiming they did want to host it and mean old Biden pressured them into pulling it so if we buy that, maybe it doesn't matter.
> What if they started banning tylenol-autism sceptical accounts?
What if it's pro-cannibalism or pedophilia content? Everyone has a line, we're all just arguing about where exactly we think that line should be.
I think if public health bodies just laid out the data they had honestly (good and bad) and said that they think most people should probably take it, but left it to people to decide, the vast, vast majority of people would still have gotten the vaccine but we wouldn't have allowed anti-vaccine sentiment to fester.
Nah, the same grifters who stand to make a political profit of turning everything into a wedge issue would have still hammered right into it. They've completely taken over public discourse on a wide range of subjects, that go well beyond COVID vaccines.
As long as you can make a dollar by telling people that their (and your) ignorance is worth just as much - or more - than someone else's knowledge, you'll find no shortage of listeners for your sermon. And that popularity will build its own social proof. (Millions of fools can't all be wrong, after all.)
There's always going to be people for all kinds of reasons pushing out bad ideas. That's part of the trade-off of living in a free society where there is no universal "right" opinion the public must hold.
> They've completely taken over public discourse on a wide range of subjects
Most people are not anti-vax. If "they've" "taken over public discourse" in other subjects to the point you are now holding a minority opinion you should consider whether "they" are right or wrong and why so many people believe what they do.
If can't understand their position and disagree you should reach out to people in a non-confrontational way, understand their position, then explain why you disagree (if you still do at that point). If we all do a better job at this we'll converge towards truth. If you think talking and debate isn't the solution to disagreements I'd argue you don't really believe in our democratic system (which isn't a judgement).
It's often a lot better to just let kooks speak freely.
Add in a healthy dose of subconsciously racist beliefs about how advanced Western society is and how catching diseases preventable by vaccines is only a brown people thing.
Basically, it's easy to be anti-vax when the disease isn't in your face and you have an out-group to blame even if it does end up in your face (a common excuse by anti-vaxxers I see when measles is in the news is that the immigrants are bringing it in and should be blamed instead of anti-vaxxers)
The problem is that the recommendation algorithms push their viewers into these echo chambers that are divorced from reality where all they see are these videos promoting misinformation. Google's approach to combating that problem was to remove the channels, but the right solution was, and still is today, to fix the algorithms to prevent people from falling into echo chambers.
pessimizer•1h ago
Actual letter: https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...
Good editorial: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-meta-congress-letter-...
murphyslab•1h ago
- https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/youtube-may-reinstate-chan...
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/youtube-will-restore...
topspin•48m ago
Yes, I know about the Charlie Kirk firings etc.