In a follow-up to yesterday’s “Rolling Stone Fakes Oklahoma Ivermectin Overdose Plague” story, Matt Taibbi (who got out of Rolling Stone while the getting was good) has a piece on how YouTube is even yanking videos critical of using Ivermectin to treat Flu Manchu:
They fixed the problem, twice. That’s the good news. The first time filmmaker, former BBC and Channel 4 journalist, and Rebel Wisdom co-founder David Fuller put together a video criticizing ivermectin advocates was on August 4th. Called “Ivermectin For and Against,” it was taken down by YouTube, on the grounds that it constituted medical misinformation.
Fuller appealed the decision for a variety of reasons – more on those later – and won. He continued investigating the subject, and taking on the claims of ivermectin advocates, hoping to conclude with a video called “Vaccines and DarkHorse: A Final Word.” This last piece included footage of well-known ivermectin advocates Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, whose DarkHorse podcast was previously featured on this site after YouTube banned some of their material.
Of course, Fuller was including the DarkHorse clip – not one of the banned ones, incidentally – to criticize it, not endorse it. But the Google/YouTube algorithm appeared confused, and Fuller’s work was not only taken down, he was also given a strike under YouTube’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out” program. He appealed again, but this time lost, leaving only one option: the media.
ok – it's even worse than I thought – YouTube has rejected the appeal – AND applied a community guidelines strike to the channel. for running a piece evaluating and CRITICISING the anti-vaccine claims made on the Dark Horse. YT actively supporting vaccine misinformation… https://t.co/yJQL8ao0be
— David Fuller (@fullydavid) August 30, 2021
It’s an unfortunate fact, but the human beings at the Google/YouTube press team have repeatedly proven to be the last, best option for fixing errors in some of the more bizarre content moderation cases. In this instance, when I reached out to YouTube to ask if they’d made a mistake, and perhaps confused Fuller with the people he was criticizing, the company quickly fixed the glitch, unstruck the strike, and restored his video, with the statement:
Upon further review, we determined that videos posted by Rebel Wisdom and Peak Prosperity were incorrectly removed. The videos are not violative of our policies and as such they’ve been reinstated.
Problem solved, right?
Not exactly. Not only was Fuller’s case just one in a recent series of deletions and strikes doled out to makers of reports about Covid-19-related issues, but the episode showed how dicey even discussing any of these issues has become for independent media figures. Fuller has done plenty of work for mainstream outlets and could have done so with this topic, but intentionally went the alternative route to take on ivermectin.
“I deliberately chose to tell the story on Rebel Wisdom rather than pitching it to a legacy media outfit,” he says. “I didn’t want to give Bret’s fans the chance to paint it as an ‘MSM smear.’”
In other words, Fuller was making a conscious effort to use an independent editorial approach, as a means of side-stepping the credibility concerns that some audiences have with mainstream outlets.
The problem is, in its zeal to clamp down on “misinformation” about everything from vaccines to perhaps-potential alternative treatments like ivermectin, YouTube and other platforms have had to rely upon algorithmic tools that can’t distinguish between critique and advocacy.
“Algorithmic tools” may indeed be at work here, though they appear to be pretty stupid ones: Any mention of using ivermectin to treat Mao Tze Lung is verbotten. But in the past, we’ve seen a lot of YouTube/Twitter/etc. censorship that seems to have been instituted by some disgruntled social justice employee aimed at conservative critics that dared violate the narrative of the moment.
Fuller, however, is also a critic of the mainstream approach of dealing with such issues, which often involves simply deploying ad hominem insults at anyone with interest in ivermectin or concerns about vaccines. “The assumption that anyone who questions the vaccines is stupid is clearly wrong,” he wrote, in a recent Medium piece.
He adds now that “these topics, especially ivermectin, have become swallowed whole as culture war signifiers.” As a result, “we’re now in a world where the mainstream won’t ‘platform’ alternative claims for fear of ‘false equivalence’ and are trying to keep alive a broken system of gatekeeping.” Fuller believes this is counter-productive, and his idea is to meet issues head on, including as much relevant information as he can, even if he ultimately comes down strongly against ivermectin and in favor of vaccines.
Both former Evergreen College professor Bret Weinstein and any discussion of Ivermectin seem seem to earn special targeting deep within the bowels of social media giants.
I have no idea whether Ivermectin is effective at treating the symptoms of coronavirus or not. Ditto hydroxychloroquine. (By contrast, there seems to be a lot of unambiguous evidence that a combination of vitamin D, Zinc and broad spectrum antibiotics are effective.) But there seem to be a lot of organizations heavily invested in punishing those who dare stray from The One True Holy Narrative of the coronavirus treatment regime, and who treat those investigating alternatives not as mistaken, but as heretics to be crushed.
It’s worth asking why.