In another ominous development, Politico reported that “Biden-allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee,” were planning to:
Engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.
For those who may find such developments concerning, there was solace: at least no one is policing our private thoughts. Those are still our own, correct?
Not quite, learned satirical filmmaker, YouTuber, and journalist Matt Orfalea. He’s been involved in several different slapstick-dystopian stories just in the last month or so, none more absurd than a series of YouTube warnings and strikes he received from YouTube for content not one person ever saw, or could see.
Orfalea was working on a video involving a story covered in this space, YouTube’s demonetization of podcaster Bret Weinstein and its removal of Senate testimony by Dr. Pierre Kory. He uploaded a series of rough cuts to his YouTube channel, but kept them locked and private, as part of his normal routine. Like many YouTube content creators, Orfalea uploads videos but keeps them locked while he applies for monetization. In other words, he’s keeping material private because he’s essentially checking with YouTube to see if there are problems with the content before he makes it public.
At 728 p.m. on June 14th, Orfalea received a warning from YouTube for three of those rough cuts:
If you trust the Biden WH to decree what is “misinformation,” these claims have been deemed as such:
* COVID is transmitted human-to-human (Jan 2020)
* You should wear masks to protect against COVID (March 2020)
* It’s possible COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab (all of 2020).
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 17, 2021
Michael Brendan Dougherty:
Now first, it’s important for streets to run both ways, so I’ll offer that proponents have trouble doing this because many of the most prominent anti-vaxxers do indulge in conspiratorial thinking. Some of it is politically motivated; people may remember that while Trump was president, prominent Democrats expressed their fears about the corruption of the research process based on nothing more than their intuition.