A YouTube spokesperson did not disclose which videos by Sky News Australia had violated its policies, but said in a statement issued on Monday that “we don’t allow content that denies the existence of Covid-19 or that encourages people to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus.”
YouTube does “allow for videos that have sufficient countervailing context, which the violative videos did not provide,” the representative added.
Sky News Australia hit back in a statement Monday, saying that it “expressly rejects that any host has ever denied the existence of Covid-19 as was implied, and no such videos were ever published or removed.”
A spokesperson for the broadcaster added that “we take our commitment to meeting editorial and community expectations seriously.”
In the piece, he claimed that YouTube’s decision to suspend the network was “for publishing opinion content the tech giant disagrees with.”
“Among the videos deemed unpalatable for societal consumption were debates around whether masks were effective and whether lockdowns were justified when considering their adverse health outcomes,” Houghton wrote.
“It is hard not to look at some of these tech giant censorship decisions as being based on one factor, the political persuasion of the person making the comments.”
YouTube, for its part, maintains that its policies are in place to “prevent the spread of Covid-19 misinformation that could cause real-world harm.”
“We apply our policies equally for everyone regardless of uploader,” the spokesperson said.
“We’ve implemented more than 10 different policies on Covid,” she said in an interview last October.