Big Tech is behaving badly. Again.
YouTube has suspended Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky for seven days for saying what even President Joe Biden’s former COVID-19 adviser says about the efficacy of cloth masks against the coronavirus.
“Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work,” the Republican senator said in a three-minute video published this week on Google’s video-sharing platform. “They don’t prevent infection.”
He added, “Saying cloth masks work when they don’t actually risks lives as someone may choose to care for a loved one with COVID while only wearing a cloth mask. This is not only bad advice, but also potentially deadly misinformation.”
YouTube quickly removed the video, which Paul’s office later shared on a rival website.
The senator’s video violated YouTube’s policy on COVID-19 medical misinformation, a company spokesperson told the New York Times. It’s true. YouTube’s policy explicitly bars users from sharing videos that promote the notion “that masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of COVID-19.”
Paul’s careful distinction about cloth masks is being ignored here.
“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,” the spokesperson said.
The weird thing isn’t that YouTube is enforcing its policies, but that it characterizes Paul’s remarks, and all such comments challenging the efficacy of cloth masks, as “misinformation.” It’s weird because epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, who serves as the director for infectious disease, research, and policy at the University of Minnesota and served previously as Biden’s coronavirus adviser, said the same thing about cloth masks in an Aug. 3 PBS interview with journalist Christiane Amanpour.
“I have had concerns, dates back to April of 2020, about the concept of masking,” the epidemiologist said. “I think we’ve all done a disservice to the public. When you actually look at face cloth coverings, those cloth pieces, uh, hang over your face. They actually only have very limited impact on reducing the amount of virus that you inhale in or exhale out. And, in fact, in studies that have been done show that if an individual might get infected within 15 minutes in a room, by time and concentration of the virus in the room, if you add a face cloth covering on, you only get about five more minutes of protection.”
He added, “I’ve been really disappointed with my colleagues in public health for not being more clear about what can masking do or not do.”
Osterholm also clarified in that same interview that N95 masks are the way to go.
“If you use the N95 respirators,” he said, “and fit them tight to your face, you can actually spend 25 hours in that same room and still be protected.”
Earlier, on CNN, Osterholm said cloth masks don’t do a lot of good against the virus.
“We know today that many of the face cloth coverings that people wear are not very effective in reducing any of the virus movement in or out. Either you’re breathing out, or you’re breathing in,” he said. “And in fact, if you’re in the Upper Midwest right now, anybody who’s wearing their face cloth covering can tell you, they can smell all the smoke that we’re still getting.”
Osterholm added, “We need to talk about better masking. We need to talk about N95 respirators, which would do a lot for both people who are not yet vaccinated or not previously infected protecting them, as well as keeping others who might become infected having been vaccinated from breathing out the virus.”
Paul, for his part, is fit to be tied that his video got him temporarily booted from YouTube, whose moderators he referred to this week as “left-wing cretins.”
Acknowledging YouTube’s rights as a private company, the senator griped that his suspension is “a continuation of their commitment to act in lockstep with the government.”
“I think 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,” the senator said.
This is the second time in a week that YouTube has removed one of Paul’s videos. It deleted a video last week because it featured the senator saying “there’s no value” in wearing “most of the masks you can get over the counter.”
YouTube’s rules enforcement policy follows a sort of three-strike rule. The company gives a warning for the first offense. If a second offense is committed within 90 days of the first offense, the site counts it as a first strike. First strikes carry a weeklong suspension. A second offense committed within 90 days of the first strike carries a two-week suspension. A third strike results in a permanent ban.
Based on my math, Paul has his first strike. If he runs afoul of YouTube’s censors again within 90 days, he’ll be suspended for two weeks. If he commits a third strike within the same time frame, he will be banned for life.
Congratulations, Democrats. Your months of haranguing Big Tech CEOs into stifling dissent and punishing opposing viewpoints under the guise of rooting out “disinformation” and “fake news” has emboldened them to go after senators over even reasonable remarks.
There’s no way this headlong descent into censorship culture ends poorly for everyone, right?
