Republican Sen. Rand Paul, of Kentucky, lashed out at YouTube after the video sharing platform suspended him has been suspended for uploading a video claiming that masks are ineffective against COVID-19.
Paul said that he felt “this kind of censorship is very dangerous, incredibly anti-free speech, and truly anti-progress of science, which involves skepticism and argumentation to arrive at the truth.”
“As a libertarian leaning Senator, I think private companies have the right to ban me if they want to, so in this case I’ll just channel that frustration into ensuring the public knows YouTube is acting as an arm of government and censoring their users for contradicting the government,” Paul added.
YouTube told CNN that the video in question “resulted in a first strike on the channel, which means it can’t upload content for a week, per our longstanding three strikes policy.”
“We apply our policies consistently across the platform, regardless of speaker or political views, and we make exceptions for videos that have additional context such as countervailing views from local health authorities,” a company spokesperson told CNN.
Paul’s supension comes a week after YouTube removed a video of Paul being interviewed by a Newsmax journalist on the science behind wearing masks during the pandemic.
YouTube said at the time that it removed the video for falsely claiming that masks were ineffective against COVID-19.
