YouTube Pulls Florida Governor Video For Spreading COVID-19 Misinformation

US media is report­ing that YouTube has pulled a video of Flori­da Gov. Ron DeSan­tis and a pan­el of sci­en­tists on the basis of spread­ing COVID-19 mis­in­for­ma­tion. Accord­ing to an NBC report:

April 9, 2021, Video of Flori­da Gov. Ron DeSan­tis and a pan­el of sci­en­tists appar­ent­ly trad­ing in Covid-19 mis­in­for­ma­tion has been pulled from YouTube. The video of DeSan­tis’ round­table dis­cus­sion last month at the state Capi­tol in Tal­la­has­see was removed on Wednes­day because it vio­lat­ed the social media platform’s stan­dards, YouTube spokesper­son Ele­na Her­nan­dez said. It had been embed­ded in a Tam­pa-area TV sta­tion’s news sto­ry and it’s removal was flagged by the Amer­i­can Insti­tute for Eco­nom­ic Research, a “free mar­ket” think tank based in Great Bar­ring­ton, Mass­a­chu­setts. “YouTube has clear poli­cies around Covid-19 med­ical mis­in­for­ma­tion to sup­port the health and safe­ty of our users,” Her­nan­dez said in a state­ment. “We removed AIER’s video because it includ­ed con­tent that con­tra­dicts the con­sen­sus of local and glob­al health author­i­ties regard­ing the effi­ca­cy of masks to pre­vent the spread of Covid-19.” Her­nan­dez said YouTube only allows videos “that oth­er­wise vio­late our poli­cies to remain on the plat­form if they con­tain suf­fi­cient edu­ca­tion­al, doc­u­men­tary, sci­en­tif­ic or artis­tic context.”

Read the rest here.

In Octo­ber 2020, we report­ed that Twit­ter had removed a Tweet from then White House advi­sor Scott Atlas that “that sought to under­mine the impor­tance of face masks because it was in vio­la­tion of the plat­for­m’s Covid-19 Mis­lead­ing Infor­ma­tion Policy.”