YouTube Censors ‘Kennedy Beacon’ Video on Censorship

By Liam Sturgess, The Kennedy Beacon

YouTube has officially begun censoring The Kennedy Beacon—ironically enough, striking down a video highlighting the problem of online censorship due to institutional corruption.

Yesterday, YouTube informed our social media team that it had removed a video we posted titled, “RFK Jr. Roundtable on Censorship—Democrats taking money from Pharma.” Why? Because they believed it violated their “medical misinformation policy.”

The clip, which can still be viewed on Twitter, came from the Roundtable on Censorship hosted by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on August 17th. Alongside the oft-censored Kennedy was an impressive panel which included journalists Glenn Greenwald and Sharyl Attkisson, attorney Jenin Younes and former New Jersey Assemblyman, Jamel Holley. Read V.N. Alexander’s full coverage of the event here.

Despite facing multiple lawsuits for this exact activity, YouTube continues to exercise arbitrary authority to violate Americans’ constitutionally-protected free speech. The Kennedy Beacon posted several clips to YouTube the day after the roundtable, including discussions about the Trusted News Initiative and the failure of most contemporary journalists to speak truth to power. Those remain up.

But the clip that YouTube took down and took issue with was one in which Kennedy explained when and how Democratic politicians began accepting money from the pharmaceutical industry. Kennedy highlighted efforts to pass President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (also known as ObamaCare) in 2014/15:

“They needed to get the pharmaceutical companies onboard. And so they made this deal with them, that the government wouldn’t bargain for pharmaceutical products. So they basically were allowed to charge anything they want… That brought the pharmaceutical companies in on the side of the Democrats . . . . It suddenly became permissible for Democrats to accept pharmaceutical money.”

In the latter half of the clip, Kennedy recalled that then-candidate Donald Trump had said on three occasions during his 2016 campaign “that he believed that he knew people, women whose children had gotten autism from vaccines.” According to Kennedy, Trump’s invocation of this highly sensitive topic led Democrats to “put that vaccine issue into the same anti-science dumpster” as Trump’s skepticism of man-made climate change.

According to YouTube, Kennedy’s summary “poses a serious risk of egregious harm by spreading medical misinformation about currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and by the World Health Organization.” Note that the World Health Organization does not have any regulatory jurisdiction whatsoever in the United States, with its mandate limited to conducting research and developing public health guidance. YouTube’s deference to “local health authorities” is also ambiguous and unspecific, given that there are just shy of 3,500 such agencies across the United States alone. 

While the platform failed to identify a specific statement within our video which violated their policies, it seems likely that YouTube flagged the video based on Kennedy’s quoting of former President Trump’s statements on vaccines and autism. In other words, The Kennedy Beacon allegedly violated YouTube’s terms of service by highlighting Kennedy’s summary of a political opponent’s prior (and possibly current) position on an issue relevant to voters in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

Earlier this month, Kennedy filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, for – as summarized by our columnist, John Leake –  “colluding with the Biden Administration to violate Kennedy’s First Amendment right to speak freely in the public forum—both as a U.S. citizen and as a presidential candidate.”

The Kennedy Beacon submitted a formal appeal within hours of our video’s removal, which YouTube promptly rejected. We will continue to update our readers on any further censorship of The Kennedy Beacon, American Values 2024, and of course, presidential candidate Kennedy.