An academic conference on media censorship and the dangers of free speech infringements online has, ironically, been censored by YouTube.
The Google-owned video platform decided to pull all videos from the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas 2020 for violating its "community standards," which include never saying anything bad about censorship.
"At first I thought it was a joke," said Mickey Huff of Diablo Valley College in California, as quoted by MintPress.
"My initial reaction was 'that's absurd;' there must have been a mistake or an accident or it must have gotten swept under somehow. There is no violation, there was no reasoning, there was no warning, there was not an explanation, there was no nothing. The entire channel was just gone."
The two-day event featured a number of esteemed speakers and panel discussions about Big Tech censorship and online violations of the First Amendment. So naturally it had to be pulled in its entirety in order to keep We the People from hearing the truth.
"Each video was a different panel and every panel had different people from the other ones, so it is not like there was one theme or person or copyrighted content in all of our videos," added Nolan Higdon of California State University, East Bay, who was one of the event's organizers.
"This seems to be an attack on the conference, not on a singular video."
Big Tech needs to be broken up and publicly run so everyone has a voice
Higdon and his colleagues actually went out of their way to ensure that there was no copyright infringement in any of the talks or panels. Many of them were conducted in lecture format similar to a Zoom call, and included some of the best-known names in media studies.
"This wasn't a keg party with Parler users: It was an academic conference," Huff explained, noting that the event was sponsored by reputable schools like Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
"These are pioneering figures in critical media literacy scholarship. It's mind-numbing that all of this was just disappeared from YouTube. The irony is writ large ... This is part of a potentially algorithmic way of getting rid of more radical positions that criticize establishment media systems, including journalism."
Google reportedly told MintPress that it has no idea where the missing videos went, and claims they were never even uploaded to YouTube. The company found only one video in its archives and reinstated it.
This explanation does not cut it for Huff or Higdon, though, as the two seem to recognize that corporations like Google and YouTube have become digital tyrants that forcibly control the free-flow of information online to the degree that free speech no longer even exists.
"I don't think they should have achieved this kind of power over our communication systems in the first place, and these should be publicly run platforms regulated the same way our government regulates and enforces the First Amendment," Huff commented.
Higdon had much the same to say about the situation, warning that the tech giants have amassed so much power that they are now blatantly trampling the constitutional rights of millions of Americans without consequence.
"By empowering these tech companies to decide what is and is not appropriate, they are going to look out for their vested interests, and people who are critical of their business model and practices are going to be targets," Higdon says.
"These lefties right now who are advocating for censorship ... the outcome of this is going to be on them."
More related news about Big Tech censorship can be found at Censorship.news.
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