YouTube Bans Criticism of the 2020 Election

YouTube has released a blog post titled "Supporting the 2020 U.S. election" in which they outline a new policy regarding criticism of the election processes and irregularities.

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,

For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come.

This means that any content that calls the election results into question by alleging widespread fraud caused Donald Trump to lose will have their video removed, and from the January 20th receive a channel strike.

If a channel receives three channel strikes the entire channel is deleted.

The main victim of this policy change will most likely be Donald Trump and any Trump-affiliated accounts that promote the opinion of the President or his lawyers.

Additionally YouTube points out that any search for 2020 election information will be algorithmically manipulated to only provide users with corporate media sources.

Limiting the reach of borderline content and prominently surfacing authoritative information are important ways we protect people from problematic content that doesn’t violate our Community Guidelines.

Over 70% of recommendations on election-related topics came from authoritative news sources and the top recommended videos and channels for election-related content were primarily authoritative news. In fact, the top 10 authoritative news channels were recommended over 14X more than the top 10 non-authoritative channels on election-related content. 

There's always more to do. [...] some videos, while not recommended prominently on YouTube, continue to get high views, sometimes coming from other sites.

This hints that this move is likely aimed at Newsmax, OANN, and other right-leaning outlets that have become the President's favourite sources of information.

These are also the only major outlets to continue to agree with the President that there are serious questions surrounding the 2020 election.

YouTube provides a graphic illustrating which outlets they will continue to privilege: Fox News, CNN, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, CNBC and USA TODAY.

Update: YouTube has since spoken to Tim Pool and clarified that you must meet two conditions for a video deletion.

You must claim "widespread fraud or error" and "say it made Trump lose".

In other words, you can claim there was "evidence of widespread fraud" or that "Trump actually won" but you cannot combine the two in a single video.