YouTube is scrambling to shut down a 26-minute vignette of the upcoming documentary Plandemic, which examines the response of global governments to the Chinese virus, and alleges that special interests including vaccine producers have the most to gain from the worldwide crisis.
The viral video, which had over a million views and has been continuously reuploaded since its removal by YouTube, features Dr. Judy Mikovits, a former medical researcher well known for her criticism of mass vaccination programs. It takes aim at Dr. Anthony Fauci and many of the advice offered by experts to contain the pandemic, including shelter-in-place and the use of masks.
The clip implies that the pandemic is being overhyped to benefit vaccine companies. Mikovits also accuses Fauci of delaying her research into AIDS treatments in the 1980s.
As of Wednesday, it had gone viral across multiple platforms including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Vimeo. According to NBC, many of these platforms are now clamping down.
Via NBC:
A YouTube spokeswoman said the platform quickly removes flagged content that violate its community guidelines, including content that includes medically unsubstantiated diagnostic advice for Covid-19. According to the company, the video was removed for making claims about a cure for Covid-19 that has not been backed by health organizations.
Vimeo said it “stands firm in keeping [its] platform safe from content that spreads harmful and misleading health information.” It said the video had been removed for violating those policies and added that it will be constantly monitoring and will continue to remove similar videos uploaded.
Twitter, where users were sharing video links and clips, said it has blocked the hashtags ”#PlagueofCorruption” and #PlandemicMovie” from trends and search. According to the company, a video shared on Twitter by Judy Mikovits, who is featured in the video, is not in violation of its misinformation policy.
Facebook has reportedly given out mixed messages, with one spokesperson telling NBC that the Plandemic video is “eligible for fact-checkers to review and rate,” and another saying “Suggesting that wearing a mask can make you sick could lead to imminent harm, so we’re removing the video.”
Although it is being censored across multiple platforms, the Plandemic clip appears to be the beneficiary of the “Streisand Effect,” an Internet adage which explains that attempts to suppress information sometimes causes that information to be be shared wider and faster, as people who believe the information is important work to get it out to people before the net of censorship closes.
The censored video is still available on alternative platforms like NewTube and Bitchute.
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Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.