YouTube Removes Yet Another Interview Featuring Donald Trump
YouTube pulled an interview between former President Donald Trump and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on Friday for violating the platform’s rules against “misinformation.”
The Daily Wire reports the latest episode of “Real America with Ronna McDaniel,” an online show featuring McDaniel’s interviews with Republicans, was removed from YouTube due to references that Trump made about the 2020 election.
The outlet reports that YouTube informed the RNC about the video removal and a strike against the official GOP YouTube account in an email Friday.
YouTube said in an email obtained by The Daily Wire that the episode was pulled because Trump claimed the 2020 election to be “rigged” without being challenged, and told the RNC that the episode would have been allowed to remain on the platform if “it included sufficient context with countervailing views.”
The email said, per The Daily Wire:
I wanted to let y’all know that your video, Real America Season 2, Episode 5: President Donald J. Trump, has been removed from the GOP YouTube channel, because it violated our policies pertaining to elections misinformation and does not contain sufficient EDSA context. Namely, the video contains claims that the 2020 election was “rigged,” with “tremendous voter fraud,” and countervailing views, which we refer to as EDSA context, on those remarks are not provided in the video, audio, title or description.
To clarify, this content would be permitted if it included sufficient context with countervailing views.
As a result, a one-time warning has been applied to the channel. This warning does not restrict your access to YouTube features, but future violations may result in Community Guidelines strikes and restrict feature access. You can find more information about our other Community Guidelines here.
McDaniel accused YouTube of “censoring conservative opinion” in Big Tech’s campaign against free speech in a statement to The Daily Wire.
“YouTube’s decision to remove a filmed conversation between former President Trump and the Chairwoman of the Republican Party is just the latest example of Big Tech’s chilling approach to censoring conservative opinion,” McDaniel said.
In March, Trump’s appearance on the Full Send podcast was an instant hit, racking up over 5 million views in under 24 hours on YouTube. The video was removed shortly after for violating YouTube’s “Terms of Service."
Trump called his shot during the podcast, at one point mentioning to the Full Send cast that he’d be surprised if the video remained up once it was posted.
“If you put up this whole interview — let’s see what happens when Instagram, and Facebook, and Twitter, and all of them, will take it down,” Trump said, via The Daily Wire. “And let’s see what happens when they threaten you. Because we don’t have a free press in our country.”