Does YouTube Consider Me a “Rightwing Extremist”?

According to a report posted at The Daily Caller, YouTube is using the Southern Poverty Law Center to police “hate” content on its video platform.

The SPLC is a member of YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers” along with the Anti-Defamation League and No Hate Speech, the latter a European organization dedicated to combatting “intolerance,” in other words, content at odds with the liberal identity politics agenda.

“It’s unclear when the SPLC joined YouTube’s ‘Trusted Flaggers’ program. The program goes back to 2012 but exploded in size in recent years amid a Google push to increase regulation of the content on its platforms, which followed pressure from advertisers. Fifty of the 113 program members joined in 2017 as YouTube stepped up its content policing, YouTube public policy director Juniper Downs told a Senate committee in January,” writes Peter Hasson.

Last year, YouTube forced users to verify their age before viewing a video on Syria I produced for Newsbud. The video currently has over 776,000 views. YouTube explained the age verification was added to the video because it includes footage of people shot in Syria at the outset of the CIA’s engineered “civil war” in that beleaguered country. The video clip in question was taken from YouTube.

In 2012, the SPLC labeled me as “among the biggest spinners of conspiracy theories in the United States… driven to distraction by a leaked 2009 DHS report that warned presciently of a rising threat from domestic right-wing extremists. Recasting this report as an attack on white, gun-owning, God-fearing Americans is something of an obsession on the radical right.”

The DHS document, Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, claims “rightwing extremists” have recruited people to engage in violence against the government, in particular veterans.

If we follow the logic of this document and the SPLC’s rhetoric, because I am supposedly “among the biggest spinners of conspiracy theories in the United States,” I have “incorporated aspects of an impending economic collapse to intensify fear and paranoia among like-minded individuals and to attract recruits during times of economic uncertainty,” which is, of course, nonsense.

In 2013, the SPLC wrote a letter to then Attorney General Eric Holder urging the government to take action against “conspiracy-minded, antigovernment groups” by establishing “an interagency task force to assess the adequacy of the resources devoted to responding to the growing threat of non-Islamic domestic terrorism.”

The SPLC has since removed the document from its website.

Political views the SPLC considers extremist are now being purged from social media, most notably Twitter and Facebook. Individuals affected by the purge have launched lawsuits in response.

Thus far, the purge has only impacted the accounts of prominent “alt-right” and “conservative” individuals. However, the object is to ultimately remove all accounts espousing “rightwing” ideas.

Finally, the flagging of my video on YouTube—the video hosting platform is owned by Google—did not touch on “rightwing” topics, but rather US foreign policy in regard to Syria, a topic often discussed by “leftwing” “antigovernment” critics as well.

The move by the social media giants to purge content is not strictly a right or left issue—it is about eventually removing all content critical of government policy, criticism that rarely if ever covered by the corporate media.