For No Clear Reason, YouTube Censors American Values 2024 Video

By Adam Garrie, The Kennedy Beacon

By Adam Garrie, The Kennedy Beacon

On January 5, YouTube removed a video uploaded to the American Values 2024 channel. The video was a recording of an event hosted by the Hon. Dion J. Powell, MPA, on behalf of American Values 2024, a super PAC that supports the presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [American Values 2024 funds The Kennedy Beacon].

The video of the informal Q&A session featured activist and author John Gilmore, who spoke about public health issues and medical ethics, particularly in relation to COVID-19 vaccine mandates and how they impacted the Black community. At no time in the video did any speaker offer medical advice. Instead, the discussion was focused on matters of public policy, labor rights, and community activism. 

Gilmore's comments were made partly to address the financial and social problems inflicted on members of the Black community following the Biden administration's decision to impose the largest vaccine mandate in American history. While many aspects of this mandate were subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court, many people remain jobless after being terminated during the period in which mandates were in force. 

According to YouTube, the video was removed for violating the platform’s policies on “medical misinformation.” 

AV24 appealed YouTube’s censorship of the video. While YouTube stated that it could take up to 72 hours for a decision to be delivered, the appeal was rejected within less than four hours, according to a source with direct knowledge of the situation. 

Google-owned YouTube became notorious for removing commentary on public health policy worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. As reported in The Kennedy Beacon, Google was not alone in stifling free speech. All major social media platforms, including those owned by Meta and the company formerly known as Twitter, were named by journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi as entities that collaborated with the federal government to censor public health related content, including truthful statements from medical professionals. 

In August of 2023, YouTube updated its “medical misinformation” policies to include the censorship of content discussing public health and other medical matters whose viewpoints contradict the policies of “local health authorities or the World Health Organization (WHO).” YouTube’s description of “medical misinformation” is as broad as it is vague, and it remains unclear which statements in the American Values 2024 video “violated” the policy. 

Objectively, the video proved that this policy is enforced in an arbitrary manner. The video was originally uploaded to the African American Values 2024 YouTube channel on September 15, 2023. As of January 5, 2024, the video remains available for the public to view on that channel. However, within 15 minutes of the same video being uploaded to the American Values 2024 channel this week, it was removed. Following the removal of the video, the American Values 2024 channel was given a “YouTube strike,” which means that no fresh content can be uploaded to the channel for a week. 

Because the video was over 28 minutes in length, it would be unreasonable to suggest that the removal and accompanying “medical misinformation” strike was the result of a human reviewing the video. It would consequently be reasonable to surmise that the video’s censorship was the result of an algorithmic tool. Therefore, either by design or through a glitch, the censorship of videos on YouTube is arbitrary, given the fact that identical postings of the same video were treated differently on two different YouTube channels. 

In the video, Gilmore briefly discusses Kennedy’s ongoing litigation against Google. In a lawsuit filed in the summer of 2023, Kennedy accuses Google of violating his First Amendment rights when it censored a number of his videos discussing vaccine safety. According to Bloomberg Law, Kennedy asserts that Google’s censorship policies are “impermissibly vague.” Shortly after Kennedy filed his lawsuit against Google, a video posted to the American Values 2024 YouTube channel was removed by the platform, as

Liam Sturgess

reported for the Beacon. In the video, Kennedy spoke about his opposition to Big Tech and government censorship. 

Because Kennedy is a presidential candidate, censoring videos in which he discusses matters of public policy could be reasonably interpreted as election interference. Google has proven links to the White House, as journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before a congressional committee last year. This makes the censorship of Kennedy and Kennedy-related content all the more dubious. 

In a further twist, a December 2020 video of President-elect Biden stating that COVID-19 vaccines should not be mandatory remains on YouTube. It appears that while videos of Biden advocating for a policy he ultimately betrayed are deemed suitable by YouTube, Kennedy’s consistent advocacy against mandates and the discussion thereof, are worthy of capricious censorship. 

Google’s arbitrary censorship of peaceful political speech has a negative impact on the wider political discourse and on voters seeking accurate information about the policies of a major presidential candidate. 

Adam Garrie is a writer, speaker, and consultant on a wide range of current affairs as well as political risk. He is also the cofounder of HiCyrus, a data-driven tech startup that aims to fully democratize information access.