YouTube and Facebook are erasing content with whistleblower’s name
November 11, 2019
YouTube and Facebook are erasing content with whistleblower’s name
By Thomas Lifson
The day has finally arrived when our online media monopolies are blatantly censoring the news that Americans can see. Chrissy Clark writes at The Federalist:
Facebook and YouTube are removing all content from their platforms that mentions the anti-Trump whistleblower’s name, whom news outlets including RealClearInvestigations have publicly identified as CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella. No law bans media outlets or any person but the intelligence community inspector general from making the whistleblower’s name public.
A Facebook spokesperson said the platform will remove “any and all mention of the potential whistleblower’s name.
Ciaramella is being made into a non-person, because House Democrats are dead set against calling him to testify in the impeachment inquiry that they are putting on starting Wednesday. They don’t want the public to know that he was an associate of John Brennan, evidently a central figure in the manufacturing of the Russia hoax, that he worked for VP Biden, and that he is a registered Democrat.
History has seen similar efforts to pretend in the media that persons inconvenient to the powerful don’t exist. When Stalin purged people he feared might become rivals, he had them airbrushed out of photos standing next to him.
Stalin had absolute control over the media in the USSR. But YouTube and Facebook dominate online videos and social media to an astounding degree in a “free market”economy. The two platforms dwarf rivals, as this chart showing their reach (the percentage of people in the United States who watch videos on them) demonstrates:
Chrissy Clark points out that the censorship is obviously political in nature:
The irony of this censorship debacle is that protecting so-called whistleblowers only seems to apply to those who help the mainstream media and Democratic agenda. This week, when ABC News was dealing with a whistleblower, her name was not forbidden on mainstream platforms like YouTube or Facebook. In fact, her name was released on YouTube, despite her claims that she is not the whistleblower who released audio showing how ABC suppressed reporting into alleged child rapist Jeffrey Epstein.
Not only are Facebook and YouTube’s standards a form of censorship, they are an example of partisanship on the largest social media platforms in the world.
YouTube is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google. If and when Google erases Ciamarelli’s name from possible search terms, the censorship effort will reach an unprecedented (and frightening) height. With Fox News and the other television networks and major newspapers cooperating in the effort to erase Ciamarelli’s name, the only way that Americans will learn about the coup plotters is when they are subpoenaed and forced to testify under oath – before a Senate committee, or perhaps a grand jury and trial jury. If that ever happens….
