“If you put up this whole interview,” Donald Trump said in a podcast live stream Wednesday afternoon, “see what happens when Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and all of them are taken down. ”
Trump misnames the platforms; podcast, Send Full, a Rogan-esque light festival, is streaming on YouTube. But on the other hand, his prediction makes sense, because in the interview he repeated his claim that he, not Joe Biden, is the rightful winner of the 2020 election. “Electoral fraud is huge,” he said, during one of the debates on the topic. “I call it the ‘crime of the century.’ We are working on a book about it. “
YouTube has a strict policy against allegations that the 2020 election was stolen. However, the video persisted for more than 24 hours, garnering more than 5 million views. YouTube took it down Thursday night, hours after WIRED asked about it. It’s the latest example of how platforms can struggle to enforce strict policies on misinformation — and raises the question of whether this kind of content ban was justified in the first place.
Consider what happened to Hill.
Last week, YouTube suspended Hill, a Washington, DC-based political publication, for seven days after its YouTube channel aired a clip of Trump claiming election fraud. One comes from his recent speech at the Conservative Party Political Action Conference. The second is an excerpt from the Trump interview on Fox News, broadcast on Hill’s daily commentary program, Rise.
The second clip isn’t even primarily about the election. In it, Trump offers his little political analysis of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Rise host conducts mocking. But right at the end of the clip, Trump says, “And it all happened because of a rigged election.”
This is enough to activate YouTube electoral integrity policy, which prohibits “false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or malfunctions have altered the results” of past presidential elections. By policy, you can only include those claims if you explicitly endorse or condemn them. That’s where Hill went wrong. “After our review, we determined that the content removed from this channel contained footage claiming the 2020 US presidential election was rigged (violating our election integrity policy). me) without full context,” YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi said in an email. One “warning” gets you a warning, two gets you a week-long suspension, and a third gets you kicked off the platform.
With all the attention paid to misinformation online, it’s easy to forget that the major platforms often refuse to remove completely false content because it’s false until 2020. Covid-19 itself, and then the war election, helped them overcome the mystery of their weight. in actual disputes. However, two years after the pandemic and more than a year after January 6, it is worth asking: What is the outcome for policies adopted during emergencies?
It’s important to remember that platforms have good reasons not to want to be “truth arbiters,” in the famous words of Mark Zuckerberg. As Trump seems to understand, it makes people feel that there are ideas that powerful entities are afraid to discuss. “If we talked about election fraud, they wouldn’t cover it,” Trump said on the podcast, referring to the “corrupt” media. He challenged the hosts to stand up against the strict social media rulers. “See what happens when they threaten you,” he said. “It was a test.” And, of course, platforms will inevitably restrict completely legal content while letting the bad stuff pass, because no one can enforce it perfectly. In addition to the podcast interview, Trump’s full CPAC stated—To show a clip that helped Hill get suspended — still available on CPAC’s YouTube channel, 11 days after it first appeared. YouTube also took the video down after WIRED asked.
In Hill’s case, YouTube’s election integrity policy seems to be based on particularly questionable assumptions. Note that when I quote Trump’s comments from the podcast, I’m not adding that his claim is false. So are you in danger of believing them, if you don’t already? The obvious premise of a policy like YouTube’s is that by 2022, there’s a fair amount of people out there who have already done so.
