YouTube’s Sky News suspension is frightening

The decision by an American company to suspend an Australian media rival should appal anyone who claims to believe in free speech.

Sky News – the conservative alternative to the ABC – has many enemies, and YouTube this week gave them a massive stick to smash us.

As the Guardian chortled: “Sky News Australia banned from YouTube for seven days over Covid misinformation”.

Our alleged crime: we “posted videos denying the existence of disease and encouraging people to use discredited medication”.

What YouTube did, and the dishonest excuse it gave, should actually appal any Australian who claims to believe in free speech, including even journalists of the Green Left and the Red Flag, both opposed to almost everything I say on my Sky News show.

YouTube has given Sky News’ enemies a massive stick to smash us.

But free speech now has few friends, and ABC presenters tweet in glee at seeing an American company put an Australian media rival on mute.

How frightening. Is this how we now resolve differences, with smears and a ban, not debate?

Let me tell you what stinks here.

We all know the social media giants – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube – lean to the Left.

All banned Donald Trump when he was still the elected president of a great democracy. He couldn’t even post YouTube clips because he allegedly incited violence.

How ironic that YouTube bans Sky for ‘misinformation’ while itself spreading misinformation.

Yet YouTube meanwhile published videos by agitators who whipped up the Black Lives Matter riots last year that had American cities in flames.

It also refused to ban the YouTube channel of the unelected supreme leader of fascist Iran, even when he urged terrorists to attack Israel, calling on them to “continue their legitimate, morally correct fight”.

So I always suspected YouTube would come for Sky News, too.

Sure enough, probably at the urging of Australian activists, it’s now trawled through Sky’s huge library of videos to find some it didn’t like.

ABC presenters have been tweeting in glee at the YouTube suspension.

We’ve posted more than 20,000 videos in the past year alone, and YouTube found a needle in our haystack – about a dozen videos it deemed unacceptable, all but one from last year.

And the belated punishment for what was said last year: Sky News suspended.

This process alone is suspicious, but worse is the explanation YouTube gave for its gag: “Specifically, we don’t allow content that denies the existence of Covid-19 or that encourages people to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus”.

That first claim, that worst claim, is totally false. No one on Sky has denied the existence of Covid-19.

I believe the virus is real and have on countless times on Sky demanded better defences against it, particularly for our old.

Fellow hosts Peta Credlin, Paul Murray, Chris Kenny, Rowan Dean, Rita Panahi and even Alan Jones, who keeps getting slimed, have also treated the virus as very real.

Sky hosts, including Alan Jones, have treated the virus as very real. Picture: Sky News

But YouTube’s false claim has now been reported around the world. I’ve seen it in the Guardian, Financial Review, Newsweek, Reuters, the BBC and the Irish Times.

How ironic that YouTube bans Sky for “misinformation” while itself spreading misinformation. But it’s also hypocritical.

Just last week, YouTube hosted another video from a popular pastor from the Global Vision Bible Church, hysterically screaming at his flock that “the Delta variant is nonsense”, face masks in his church were banned, and “do not get vaccinated, do not get vaccinated”.

Yet YouTube now stops me and other Sky hosts from posting videos of our shows this week in which we call on people to get vaccinated, and to not trust the ABC’s dangerous scaremongering (also on YouTube) on the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Sky has posted more than 20,000 videos in the past year alone, and YouTube found a needle in our haystack.

Some might argue YouTube was at least partially right, punishing Sky for having publicised hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin.

But wait. Last year, I, too, interviewed Professor Thomas Borody, the brilliant scientist who developed the first cure for peptic ulcers. This time he thought the anti-parasite drug ivermectin could also treat this coronavirus, and was frustrated that regulators wouldn’t look at his evidence.

Was it wrong for Sky to report his claims? True, there’s today serious doubt that ivermectin works, yet leading scientists from Oxford University and the US National Institutes of Health still think it’s promising enough for them to now study in depth.

That’s how science works. People put up a theory. Others then debate it.
If the theory proves true, we get a breakthrough like Borody’s peptic
ulcer treatment.

But if it proves false, will YouTube trawl back in a media outlet’s archives to find any video that ever touted it, and suspend it from posting any new videos about any topic, including videos that could help save lives?

Stifling free speech is not how we advance. It’s how we’re kept in ignorance – and chains.