YouTube censored ‘Borderless,’ a new documentary about mass immigration from independent filmmaker Lauren Southern, on the day of its release.
The feature-length documentary was taken down from YouTube less than 24 hours after it was uploaded, and is currently unavailable. YouTube has yet to give Southern an explanation for its removal.
Southern has since uploaded a backup version to YouTube, although the loss of the original is likely to skew the documentary’s view count. Southern’s previous documentary, about the racially-motivated murder of white farmers in South Africa, accumulated over 2.3 million views on the platform.
Southern says she received a message from YouTube saying the video had “stopped processing.” But Southern points out that processing errors take place before a video has been uploaded, not after.
The Google-owned video platform initially appeared to “soft-censor” Southern’s documentary. YouTube users attempting to access the video found it marked as “deleted” in their favorites feed, and disappeared from their subscription feed, which is meant to show videos from subscribed channels.
“It can’t be a coincidence that it’s not in notifications, shows as deleted, not on my videos list, doesn’t show in recent history…” wrote Southern before the video was fully taken down.
There have been documented cases of Silicon Valley giants using deliberately triggered “errors” to interfere with politically disfavored content creators. A leak from Facebook earlier this year revealed that the company uses “forced glitches” against right-wing users.
Before the documentary was released, Southern’s team successfully exposed an NGO, catching its executive director admitting on camera that it encourages migrants to lie to EU border officials about their reasons for entering Europe. Southern reported that the UN High Commission for Refugees responded to her report, calling it “alarming.”