A German Court has slammed Youtube for deleting controversial COVID Interviews.
YouTube censorship of Covid-19 debate is a “dangerous encroachment” on the freedom of speech, an editor at leading German tabloid Bild has said, after the platform deleted two videos of an online debate on the pandemic.
The preliminary injunction was issued by the Cologne Regional Court in response to a legal challenge filed by the people behind the #allesaufdentisch (#EverythingOnTheTable) online campaign.
It’s basically a collection of interviews with various experts and public figures about the Covid-19 pandemic that the initiators touted as a “wide-ranging, fact-based, open and factual discourse” on their website.
Some of them challenged the government handling of the pandemic and raised all sorts of controversial vaccine-related issues.
YouTube found two of those interviews unfit for its hosting and erased them. The flagged videos showed discussions with mathematics professor Stephan Luckhaus and the neurobiologist Gerald Huther.
The court called YouTube’s move “unjustified”, saying that the platform failed to explain which exact parts of the interviews it deemed in violation of its community rules for health-related content, according to German media.
The explanation of why the videos were deleted was kept pretty vague, claiming that some opinions about the vaccination against Covid-19 went against the scientific consensus.
Overall, the videos contained “a large number of clearly permissible statements”, the court said, which gave credence to the plaintiffs’ argument that YouTube had unfairly restricted their freedom of expression. The injunction said the court decision can be appealed.
The #allesaufdentisch campaign was launched in late September and was considered a spiritual successor of a similar #allesdichtmachen (#CloseEverythig) anti-lockdown online movement, which tilted more to satirical content.
Critics say the newer interviews are a mixture of justified criticism, trivialities and “targeted disinformation”, as the daily Die Zeit described it.
But many people believe the public deserves the right to see those opinions and judge their validity for themselves, without interference from American tech giants.
Jan Schafer, the political director of the influential German tabloid Bild, hailed the court’s decision, calling YouTube’s increasingly broad use of censorship a “dangerous encroachment” on public discourse in Germany.
Bild was the first to obtain and cover the court injunction on Sunday evening. It remains unclear how much influence the opinion of the German justice system will have on US-based Google, the owner of YouTube.
Earlier, YouTube was fined 100,000 euros by the German Higher Regional Court at Dresden after it wrongly deleted a user’s video which showed massive pandemic lockdown protests in Switzerland – and then failed to reinstate the video ‘immediately’ after the court ordered it to do so on April 20.
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“The explanation of why the videos were deleted was kept pretty vague, claiming that some opinions about the vaccination against Covid-19 went against the scientific consensus.”
This claim about scientific consensus is blatant nonsense, and exposes the biased game of censorship that is being played here. Science is not a biased voting game of elected preferences and consensus of any sorts. The concept of scientific consensus is a contradiction in terms.
What are the courts going to do? Fine them some more? Google carries around more change in its pocket than anything their fines might add up to.
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Slam YouTube? Why not ban YouTube? All the artists will migrate and you won’t have censorship. Ban them for their bad behavior.
There is a wide variety of information presented on YouTube that is not censored. Such as videos that are educational, informative, artistically oriented, etc. There is no need to eliminate a platform that is so widely and effectively used simply due to the idiocy of a few people at the top. It might be a good idea, at some point in the future to make this a publicly owned entity. I think of it as a car that has a cracked steering mechanism, you don’t throw away a perfectly good car over something like, that you just replace the broken part,