Back in 2019, I was a guest on the Bob Murphy Show, talking about the recently passed California bill that essentially removed all vaccine exemptions for children attending school in that Godforsaken state. I wrote about that bill here, and you can see the episode here.
Bob also posted the interview on YouTube, and just yesterday – in July of 2024 – he received a notice saying that the video had been removed, for violating YouTube’s “medical misinformation policy.”
Here’s what YouTube determined to be content that “…poses a serious risk of egregious harm” to viewers:
At 00:19:33, I am talking with Bob about the claim that was made repeatedly in the mainstream media, that vaccination rates for the MMR vaccine in the US had dropped after the Wakefield paper (which had found that there *might* be a link between the MMR vaccine and autism) came out and that this drop in MMR vaccination rates had caused a rise in measles cases.
The claim is categorically false, and I used CDC data to show that when I wrote about it here.
I tried to pull up the CDC data I had used, when Bob told me the video had been taken down, but it was no longer up on the CDC’s site, and it looks to me as if the CDC is no longer reporting on these numbers prior to (children born in) 2011.
Fortunately, there’s this thing called the Wayback Machine. So I went over there and found what I was looking for. Not all of it, but enough of what I had originally referenced to make my point:
So there it is. One more example of a major social-media platform removing truthful content that contradicts the – obviously by now – mendacious establishment narrative on vaccines. And what’s truly baffling to me is: Why have they not changed their strategy? Why have they not adapted their tactics to what is clearly a new landscape?
I don’t have a good answer. Either the folks running YouTube are living inside of a much smaller bubble than the rest of us are, and that bubble will soon be punctured by their own hubris… or *I* am living inside a smaller bubble than I thought I was, and the vast majority of the people around me are much, much stupider than I thought they were.
My gut is on the former. And I think El Gato Malo is right when he says:
“trust in government, politicians, media, schools, and institutions is at rock bottom triple sub-basement lows.
“it’s like the old soviet union. everyone assumes the worst. they expect to be lied to. fraud is the modal outcome and modal expectation. you triangulate on truth by seeing what lies they feel the need to tell you.”
And if he is, then the folks at YouTube, Facebook, the NYT, Washington Post, and all the rest of them really have no idea what’s coming, or what it’s going to mean for them.
I almost feel sorry for them.
The thought police at YouTube and elsewhere are like WW1 generals fighting the last war rather than the current one.
It is much like the current artless effort by the corporate media to claim that Kamala Harris was never a "border czar" even though it was corporate media itself that originally applied the term to her role on border issues and immigration.
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/kamala-harris-border-czar
The thought police at YouTube fail to account for all the ways content can be archived across the Internet. Believing they are still the gatekeepers of information, they are defending the narrative rather than engage with the idea. Instead of responding to factual claims and challenges to their preferred narrative, they think they can simply silence the critics.
What they fail to realize is that, because the data often does survive their efforts to erase it, the censorship strips away the moral legitimacy of their position. They are taking a torch to their own credibility and will not realize the damage they are doing to themselves until it is too late.
It's bad enough getting shamed when you've actually said or done something wrong; here you're getting shamed (censored) for telling the truth. Very frustrating! I hope Bob M will start using Rumble, either with or without YouTube in addition: as far as I know, they don't censor.