YouTube said it will begin removing content that alleges there was widespread fraud in the presidential election.
The video uploading platform announced the policy update on Wednesday, one day after the “safe harbor” deadline, which is generally accepted as the date by which all state-level election challenges are supposed to be completed.
“Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect,” the platform said in a blog post. “Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections.”
An example of a video that would be removed from the platform would be one that claimed “a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors,” YouTube said.
“We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come,” the blog added.
Rumble, a conservative alternative for video sharing, told the Washington Examiner that they would “never censor political discussion.”
“Rumble will never censor political discussion, opinion or act like the arbiters of truth,” Chris Pavlovski, Rumble’s CEO, said in a statement. “Additionally, we have no desire to change our policies every month due to external pressure.”
President Trump has repeatedly claimed widespread voter fraud and other irregularities cost him the election and refuses to concede President-elect Joe Biden won. Trump’s campaign and other GOP groups have filed dozens of lawsuits in battleground states that Biden won, but they have had little success so far in court. The same goes for the last-ditch effort to convince state legislatures with Republican majorities to appoint electors who will cast their Electoral College votes for Trump instead of Biden regardless of the popular vote.
Attorney General William Barr said last week the Justice Department has “not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” including voting machines “programmed essentially to skew the election results.”
Despite YouTube’s new policy, a number of videos questioning if Trump legitimately won the 2016 election remain available.
