YouTube has permanently banned LifeSiteNews, a popular pro-life news outlet with some 314,000 subscribers.
LifeSiteNews editor-in-chief John-Henry Westen told the Catholic News Agency (CNA) that YouTube did not provide “a specific reason for the deletion of the account” and there was no way to appeal the decision.
“Our best guess is that the channel was taken down for our frank and factual discussion of the controversy around abortion-tainted medicines and vaccines,” Westen said. “The origins of these vaccines and their association with abortion is acknowledged by the vast majority of scientists.”
“Prior strikes were given for speaking the truth about COVID [coronavirus] lockdowns and the presence of aborted fetal cells in the vaccines,” he said.
Billing itself as the “#1 pro-life news website,” LifeSiteNews was founded in 1997 as a non-profit online news service.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on February 11 that the banning of LifeSiteNews was the latest move in “the most sweeping mass censorship campaign in the history of this country.”
Why did Google pull a pro-life website off YouTube? Carlson asked. “Simple. Google supports abortion. A lot of big corporations do.”
The Italian Catholic journal Il Timone called YouTube’s decision to ban LifeSiteNews a worrisome example of “a real campaign of censorship and blackout by internet giants” targeting conservatives and, in particular, pro-life voices.
The cancelling of LifeSiteNews is an especially “sensational example” of this campaign, Il Timone said, precisely because the pro-life site is so well established and “scores a huge number of visits every day from all over the world.”
In its February 13 report, CNA said that Google, YouTube’s parent company, later declared it had banned LifeSiteNews for violating its coronavirus misinformation policy, including “content that promotes prevention methods that contradict local health authorities or WHO.”
In December, YouTube deleted a LifeSiteNews video in which a Canadian pathologist, Dr. Roger Hodkinson, protested the “unfounded public hysteria” surrounding the coronavirus.
Dr. Hodkinson has claimed that coronavirus is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated” and “just another bad flu.”
In the wake of YouTube’s decision, LifeSiteNews has produced a compilation of the videos responsible for the banning, so that viewers can judge for themselves whether the material violated standards of decency, ethics, and truth-telling.
Dr. Edward Furton, an ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, denounced YouTube’s decision to remove LifeSiteNews.
“The National Catholic Bioethics Center condemns the arbitrary decision of YouTube to censor content simply because they find it disagreeable or in opposition to their own political views,” Furton said.
“YouTube is not staffed by scientists, but by engineers and technicians who understand little to nothing about scientific matters,” he said. “Far worse, they favor a liberal ideology that supports abortion not only here at home but throughout the world. They believe that there is a universal right to kill the unborn. Such a view revokes their claim to moral superiority over others.”
Furton went on to underscore the dangers of Big Tech censorship to a democratic political system.
“Censorship by big tech is one of the greatest threats to the principles of democracy that we have seen in decades. This is done solely for the purpose of controlling information and preventing the free discussion of ideas among their fellow citizens,” he told CNA. “Unfortunately, this will become increasingly common until our political leaders gather up the courage to enact legislation that will protect the free expression of ideas.”
Twitter had already banned LifeSiteNews for its reporting on a Canadian transgender activist who is biologically male but identifies as a woman.
“Just like when we were barred from Twitter for calling a biological male a male, we will continue to speak the truth and will not give in to the threats of Big Tech and the censors who wish to remove inconvenient truths form the public square,” Westen said.
Google’s misinformation policy also bars content that disputes health authorities’ guidance on the effectiveness of “physical distancing or self-isolation measures to reduce transmission of COVID-19.”