PragerU: Google Censors Us Because We’re Effective

PragerU Chief Marketing Officer Craig Strazzeri spoke to Breitbart News on Friday, where he talked about PragerU’s struggles with Big Tech censorship, and the indoctrination by the left on college campuses, which has weakened young people’s belief in free speech. Strazzeri joined host Alex Marlow in a Friday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily.

PragerU Chief Marketing Officer Craig Strazzeri described the organization’s trouble with the Google-owned YouTube video platform to Marlow. “We have a ten-part series on the ten commandments,” said Strazzeri, “and five of those videos are placed in restricted mode, which primarily affects young people. Millions of young users use restricted mode to filter out pornography of violence, and [YouTube]’s lumping in five of the ten commandments.”

“This is what Google and YouTube don’t want young people to hear, very mainstream, Judeo-Christian values, it’s really scary,” added Strazzeri. “We know the reason they’re restricting it from us, it’s because of our reach, we reach millions of people, we’re very effective.”

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Strazzeri noted that Google’s argument is insisting that “PragerU is a YouTube success story,” suggesting that the conservative organization is not being hindered, given that it already reaching plenty of people.

“This is their new talking point,” said Strazzeri. “They keep touting — ‘[PragerU] reaches millions of people, we only restrict a certain portion of their videos, which only affect a certain portion of our users,’ but what they always fail to mention is how they have 1.8 billion users — and 1.5 percent of them use restricted mode, that’s 27 million people who cannot access 200 PragerU videos.”

“That’s not an insignificant number as they pretend to claim,” added Strazzeri. “And they continue to lie and say that our videos break their very vague ‘community guidelines,’ when everyone who has an ounce of intellectual honesty knows that it’s because we’re conservative, and because we’re effective.”

He also talked about his frustration with there being no “viable alternative” to YouTube, and how that reality effectively forces PragerU to use the platform if they want to reach new people and change minds — which is the organization’s primary goal.

[YouTube] is where everybody is, we don’t want to be in an echo chamber. One of our big things at PragerU is we want to change minds. We want to influence people who may or may not agree, and it’s a sad reality in America that you go from Kindergarten to college [and] you’ve never even heard a conservative point a view.

People have an open mind, and we get letters every day, like, “Wow, I never knew that these ideas were out there, I’ve never heard them before, they make a lot of sense to me, it sounds like common sense.” So we’re just trying to reach people who have never even heard our ideas, and these people are on YouTube. So we’re not just going to get off of YouTube — which is what they want — and go and join just a conservative-only website, we want to reach the world where everyone else is, and they’re treating us differently because we’re conservatives.

Strazzeri also spoke about some of the other videos produced by PragerU, which seek to delve into the general consensus among students on college campuses through “man on the street” interviews.

“We actually have Will Witt — a personality for us who does these ‘man on the street’ interviews,” said Strazzeri, “and he did do one on online censorship — hate speech in particular — and responses are, unfortunately, very troubling and sad.”

“A whole generation of young people have been indoctrinated in school to think that any point of view that they disagree with, or that makes them uncomfortable, or that might offend them in any possible way, is considered ‘hate speech,’ and that hate speech should be banned,” added the chief marketing officer.

“We’ve created a generation of ‘snowflakes,’ as everyone likes to call them, but it’s actually a really troubling sign that they do want speech to be censored to a certain point,” he said.

Nonetheless, Strazzeri did say that PragerU has found success in reaching young people and changing minds, including on the issue of free speech.

“We do target young people with the goal of introducing them to conservative ideas, and we’ve done some surveys, [showing] up to 70 percent of our viewers have changed their mind on an issue after watching a PragerU video,” said Strazzeri. “So, there are some signs for optimism, but we have to keep fighting.”

“Unfortunately, the left dominates the digital landscape,” he added. “We have an uphill battle with Big Tech censorship, so we’ve done a lot of good work, but we’re not going to be complacent, we have a long way to go — the left is a big powerful machine.”

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, on Parler at @alana, and on Instagram.