Just under three years ago, Infowars anchor Alex Jones was tossed off Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify, marking the unofficial launch of the “content moderation” era. The censorship envelope has since widened dramatically via a series of high-profile incidents: Facebook and Twitter
This week’s decision by YouTube to demonetize podcaster Bret Weinstein belongs on that list, and has a case to be put at or near the top, representing a different and perhaps more unnerving speech conundrum than those other episodes.
Profiled in this space two weeks ago, Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying — both biologists — host the podcast DarkHorse, which by any measure is among the more successful independent media operations in the country.They have two YouTube channels, a main channel featuring whole episodes and livestreams, and a “clips” channel featuring excerpts from those shows.
Between the two channels, they’ve been flagged 11 times in the last month or so. Specifically, YouTube has honed in on two areas of discussion it believes promote “medical misinformation.” The first is the potential efficacy of the repurposed drug ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment. The second is the third rail of third rails, i.e. the possible shortcomings of the mRNA vaccines produced by companies like Moderna and Pfizer.
Weinstein, who was also criticized for arguing the lab-leak theory before conventional wisdom shifted on that topic, says YouTube’s decision will result in the loss of “half” of his and Heying’s income. However, he says, YouTube told him he can reapply after a month.
YouTube’s notice put it as follows: “Edit your channel and reapply for monetization… Make changes to your channel based on our feedback. Changes can include editing or deleting videos and updating video details.”
“They want me to self-censor,” he says. “Unless I stop broadcasting information that runs afoul of their CDC-approved talking points, I’ll remain demonetized.”
Weinstein’s travails with YouTube sound like something out of a Star Trek episode, in which the Enterprise crew tries and fails to communicate with a malevolent AI attacking the ship. In the last two weeks, he emailed back and forth with the firm, at one point receiving an email from someone who identified himself only as “Christopher,” indicating a desire to set up a discussion between Weinstein and various parties at YouTube.
Over the course of these communications, Weinstein asked if he could nail down the name and contact number of the person with whom he was interacting. “I said, ‘Look, I need to know who you are first, whether you’re real, what your real first and last names are, what your phone number is, and so on,” Weinstein recounts. “But on asking what ‘Christopher’s’ real name and email was, they wouldn’t even go that far.” After this demand of his, instead of giving him an actual contact, YouTube sent him a pair of less personalized demonetization notices.
As has been noted in this space multiple times, this is a common theme in nearly all of these stories, but Weinstein’s tale is at once weirder and more involved, as most people in these dilemmas never get past the form-letter response stage. YouTube has responded throughout to media queries about Weinstein’s case, suggesting they take it seriously.
YouTube’s decision with regard to Weinstein and Heying seems part of an overall butterfly effect, as numerous other figures either connected to the topic or to DarkHorse have been censured by various platforms. Weinstein guest Dr. Robert Malone, a former Salk Institute researcher often credited with helping develop mRNA vaccine technology, has been suspended from LinkedIn, and Weinstein guest Dr. Pierre Kory of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) has had his appearances removed by YouTube. Even Satoshi Ōmura, who won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for his work on ivermectin, reportedly had a video removed by YouTube this week.
There are several factors that make the DarkHorse incident different from other major Silicon Valley moderation decisions, including the fact that the content in question doesn’t involve electoral politics, foreign intervention, or incitement. The main issue is the possible blurring of lines between public and private censorship.
When I contacted YouTube about Weinstein two weeks ago, I was told, “In general, we rely on guidance from local and global health authorities (FDA, CDC, WHO, NHS, etc) in developing our COVID-19 misinformation policies.”
The question is, how active is that “guidance”? Is YouTube acting in consultation with those bodies in developing those moderation policies? As Weinstein notes, an answer in the affirmative would likely make theirs a true First Amendment problem, with an agency like the CDC not only setting public health policy but also effectively setting guidelines for private discussion about those policies. “If it is in consultation with the government,” he says, “it’s an entirely different issue.”
Asked specifically after Weinstein’s demonetization if the “guidance” included consultation with authorities, YouTube essentially said yes, pointing to previous announcements that they consult other authorities, and adding, “When we develop our policies we consult outside experts and YouTube creators. In the case of our COVID-19 misinformation policies, it would be guidance from local and global health authorities.”
Weinstein and Heying might be the most prominent non-conservative media operation to fall this far afoul of a platform like YouTube. Unlike the case of, say, Alex Jones, the moves against the show’s content have not been roundly cheered. In fact, they’ve inspired blowback from across the media spectrum, with everyone from Bill Maher to Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson taking notice.
“They threw Bret Weinstein off YouTube, or almost,” Maher said on Real Time last week. “YouTube should not be telling me what I can see about ivermectin. Ivermectin isn’t a registered Republican. It’s a drug!”
From YouTube’s perspective, the argument for “medical misinformation” in the DarkHorse videos probably comes down to a few themes in Weinstein’s shows. Take, for example, an exchange between Weinstein and Malone in a video about the mRNA vaccines produced by companies like Moderna and Pfizer:
Weinstein: The other problem is that what these vaccines do is they encode spike protein… but the spike protein itself we now know is very dangerous, it’s cytotoxic, is that a fair description?
Malone: More than fair, and I alerted the FDA about this risk months and months and months ago.
In another moment, entrepreneur and funder of fluvoxamine studies Steve Kirsch mentioned that his carpet cleaner had a heart attack minutes after taking the Pfizer vaccine, and cited Canadian viral immunologist Byram Bridle in saying that that the COVID-19 vaccine doesn’t stay localized at point of injection, but “goes throughout your entire body, it goes to your brain to your heart.”
Politifactrated the claim that spike protein is cytotoxic “false,” citing the CDC to describe the spike protein as “harmless.” As to the idea that the protein does damage to other parts of the body, including the heart, they quoted an FDA spokesperson who said there’s no evidence the spike protein “lingers at any toxic level in the body.”
Would many doctors argue that the 226 identified cases of myocarditis so far is tiny in the context of 130 million vaccine doses administered, and overall the danger of myocarditis associated with vaccine is far lower than the dangers of myocarditis in Covid-19 patients?
Absolutely. It’s also true that the CDC itself had a meeting on June 18th to discuss cases of heart inflammation reported among people who’d received the vaccine. The CDC, in other words, is simultaneously telling news outlets like Politifact that spike protein is “harmless,” and also having ad-hoc meetings to discuss the possibility, however remote from their point of view, that it is not harmless. Are only CDC officials allowed to discuss these matters?
The larger problem with YouTube’s action is that it relies upon those government guidelines, which in turn are significantly dependent upon information provided to them by pharmaceutical companies, which have long track records of being less than forthright with the public.
In the last decade, for instance, the U.S. government spent over $1.5 billion to stockpile Tamiflu, a drug produced by the Swiss pharma firm Roche. It later came out — thanks to the efforts of a Japanese pediatrician who left a comment on an online forum — that Roche had withheld crucial testing information from British and American buyers, leading to a massive fraud suit. Similar controversies involving the arthritis drug Vioxx and the diabetes drug Avandia were prompted by investigations by independent doctors and academics.
As with financial services, military contracting, environmental protection, and other fields, the phenomenon of regulatory capture is demonstrably real in the pharmaceutical world. This makes basing any moderation policy on official guidelines problematic. If the proper vaccine policy is X, but the actual policy ends up being X plus unknown commercial consideration Y, a policy like YouTube’s more or less automatically preempts discussion of Y.
Some of Weinstein’s broadcasts involve exactly such questions about whether or not it’s necessary to give Covid-19 vaccines to children, to pregnant women, and to people who’ve already had Covid-19, and whether or not the official stance on those matters is colored by profit considerations. Other issues, like whether or not boosters are going to be necessary, need a hard look in light of the commercial incentives.
These are legitimate discussions, as the WHOs own behavior shows. On April 8th, the WHO website said flatly: “Children should not be vaccinated for the moment.” A month and a half later, the WHO issued a new guidance, saying the Pfizer vaccine was “suitable for use by people aged 12 years and above.”
The WHO was clear that its early recommendation was based on a lack of data, and on uncertainty about whether or not children with a low likelihood of infection should be a “priority,” and not on any definite conviction that the vaccine was unsafe. And, again, a Politifact check on the notion that the WHO “reversed its stance” on children rated the claim false, saying that the WHO merely “updated” its guidance on children. Still, the whole drama over the WHO recommendation suggested it should at least be an allowable topic of discussion.
Certainly there are critics of Weinstein’s who blanch at the use of sci-fi terms like “red pill” (derived from worldview-altering truth pill in The Matrix), employing language like “very dangerous” to describe the mRNA vaccines, and descriptions of ivermectin as a drug that would “almost certainly make you better.”
Even to those critics, however, the larger issue Weinstein’s case highlights should be clear. If platforms like YouTube are basing speech regulation policies on government guidelines, and government agencies demonstrably can be captured by industry, the potential exists for a new brand of capture — intellectual capture, where corporate money can theoretically buy not just regulatory relief but the broader preemption of public criticism. It’s vaccines today, and that issue is important enough, but what if in the future the questions involve the performance of an expensive weapons program, or a finance company contracted to administer bailout funds, or health risks posed by a private polluter?
Weinstein believes capture plays a role in his case at some level. “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” he says. He hopes the pressure from the public and from the media will push platforms like YouTube to reveal exactly how, and with whom, they settle upon their speech guidelines. “There’s something industrial strength about the censorship,” he says, adding. “There needs to be a public campaign to reject it.”
I watched Weinstein’s Youtube discussion of the mRNA vaccine with Robert Malone. As a physician, I didn’t find his discussion particularly convincing, nor that of Dr. Malone. Three or four hundred million people have now been vaccinated and we are not seeing a lot of serious side effects, which we would almost have certainly seen by now if there really was a problem. The issue, as I see it, is that Weinstein is making a living with his Youtube channel and obviously, he is motivated to increase his income by generating controversy. There’s a heck of a lot of content on Youtube and careful, well-reasoned discussion probably would generate less income than outlandish claims. As a physician, I’m used to reading medical journals and I have enough statistical training to evaluate the evidence. That’s not true for the majority of people exposed to this kind of programming. I’d have found Weinstein’s program a lot more interesting if he had brought on an active mRNA researcher to debate Dr. Malone. (I don’t think Dr. Malone is “in his dotage” at age 60, but he’s clearly not involved with this kind of work anymore.) Weinstein is a smart guy, but he’s not a physician, and not a virologist. His show needs to be a little more balanced if he wants to be taken seriously.
Check out Dr John Campbell , https://youtube.com/c/Campbellteaching he has over 1 million subs, talks about ivermectin all the time and is not demonetized. Why? Because of how he frames it, he is also a believer in vaccines.
Bret on the other hand has gone full Alex Jones with a messiah complex to boot! He has lost the fucking plot completely. Nothing he says makes sense anymore, it’s full on global conspiracy shit. He takes ivermectin live on air.. says he is not getting vaccinated but using ivermectin prophylacticly?.. it’s just totally over the top for a public channel and asking to be demonetized.
I think the reason there’s very little effort going into figuring out if ivermectin works is because we have vaccines that work so well and the fact that so many people got burned promoting early alternative treatments that turned out to be bullshit like hydroxychloroquine…. But I’m sure I’m wrong and Bret is the savior of humanity battling against big tech and the globalists behind the great reset! Maybe he should try and build back betterer his channel.
Protesters gathered on May 29 – June 7 to protest the killing of George Floyd
Last year, Bill Barr and others directed that Lafayette Square be cleared of protestors who were exercising their 1st Amendment rights so then-President Donald Trump could walk across the street to stand in front of a church for a political photo-op. The ACLU filed suit on behalf of protestors and journalists that were assaulted by law enforcement officers while they cleared the way for Trump’s political stunt.
In a troubling move, the Department of Justice has now urged the judge to dismiss the case, claiming that Trump, Barr and other government officials have immunity from this particular lawsuit. This video presents an argument for why the suit should not be dismissed but instead should proceed to the discovery phase to, at a minimum, determine if Trump and Barr were acting within the scope of their official governmental duties when they ordered the area cleared – shutting down the protestors’ exercise of their 1st Amendment rights, for a presidential photo op.
“Unlawful assembly” is like “illegal writing” or “forbidden religious exercise”: There surely may be such a thing, but what qualifies?
Recent weeks have produced a lifetime’s worth of haunting images. Some of them everyone has seen: black-clad “agents” hustling citizens into unmarked vans, “counterdemonstrators” with automatic weapons dogging Black Lives Matter protests. Others I have seen in person: on a recent trip to Portland, Oregon, groups of mothers marching in front of a federal courthouse to protect protesters who had been gassed and beaten during previous demonstrations; on a stroll through a neighborhood park in my small hometown of Eugene, Oregon, a dozen masked “security guards” with assault rifles offering protection to anti-police-violence protesters.
And the backdrop to all these sights is the indelible image of a flag-draped coffin bearing the body of Representative John Lewis on his final trip—this one over a path strewn with rose petals—across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Alabama.
Lewis’s cortege recalled a scene from half a century ago—one that echoed strangely amid the alarms and cries of this haunted July.
On Sunday, March 7, 1965, Lewis and Hosea Williams led a peaceful crowd of some 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was a march for voting rights—but it also was a protest against police violence, in particular the police killing of a 26-year-old man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was beaten and then shot twice in the back during a voting-rights march on February 18 of that year.
That March day, on the other side of the bridge stood hundreds of Alabama state troopers, sheriff’s deputies, and mounted “possemen” (white locals “deputized” by Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark). They were armed with rifles, tear gas, batons, and cattle prods. “It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march,” Alabama State Police Major John Cloud announced. “And I’m saying this is an unlawful assembly. You are to disperse.”
The subsequent violence became known as “Bloody Sunday,” and the shock waves it sent across the country transformed the national debate about voting rights for Black Americans.
The words that echo in 2020 are “This is an unlawful assembly.” This summer, police in Oregon have been “declaring riots” almost every night. And Oregon is not even on the cutting edge: The mayor of one southern hamlet, Graham, North Carolina, recently “suspended” all protests, out of a professed fear that demonstrations against Confederate monuments would lead to violence. Similarly, the troopers who brutalized the crowd of unarmed men, women, and children on Bloody Sunday saw themselves as enforcers of the law. But, textually, the words unlawful assembly embody a tension, even a contradiction—because the First Amendment, in its very terms, protects “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” So “unlawful assembly” is like “illegal writing” or “forbidden religious exercise”: There surely may be such a thing, but, in each case, the burden has to be on the authorities to explain why this assembly, this writing, this religious exercise is an exception to the broad protection afforded to these important political rights.
By the logic of unlawful assembly, John Lewis had it coming. He and the marchers had gathered without permission. They had blocked a highway. Told to go home, they stayed. And violence followed. If you want to get technical, the marchers didn’t commit the violence—it was committed by the police and the local white toughs who hung around the fringes of the march. But the marchers had gathered in a place where the police didn’t want them. As one local white official explained to Martin Luther King Jr. in the aftermath of the march, “Everywhere you have been, there has been violence.”
Police and demonstrators during the march on the courthouse in Selma, Ala. on March 13, 1965. (AP)
Some scholars have argued recently that Americans have lost sight of “peaceable assembly” as an important constitutional right. One of them is Tabatha Abu El-Haj, a professor at the Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law, whom I spoke with last week. Abu El-Haj has written extensively about the First Amendment and the right to assemble in particular, including a 2009 article called “The Neglected Right of Assembly.” Abu El-Haj explained to me that while England maintained a relatively tight leash on popular assemblies, the experience of the American Revolution convinced early Americans of the importance of “the people out of doors” as part of citizenship and political participation. Marches, open-air meetings, and protests were routinely held on public property during the 18th and 19th centuries. Not until 1914, in fact, did New York, by then a city of 2 million, even begin to require permits for these marches.
Abu El-Haj said that contemporary First Amendment doctrine has concentrated on freedom of speech, treating the right of groups to assemble as merely a subset of the right of individuals to speak. That’s not in accordance with the words of the Constitution, she pointed out. “Courts should take a textual approach and thus disaggregate peaceable assembly from freedom of speech,” she said.
Of course, even in the heyday of the right to assemble, governments had the power to shut down riots. But the threshold for “reading the Riot Act” was the risk of serious violence—something equivalent to today’s Brandenburg test for incitement to crime. That formulation, announced by the Supreme Court in the 1950s, empowers the government to punish speech as incitement only when it is “directed to and likely to cause imminent lawless action.” By general agreement, lawless action means something more serious than jaywalking, peacefully blocking sidewalks and streets, or even cursing and taunting police.
In addition, Abu El-Haj said, crowds should not be declared “unlawful” unless they are violent and they refuse to disperse after a clear warning. She cited as examples the protests in Philadelphia in late May and early June, in which some marchers burned police vehicles and set fire to or looted stores. “That’s a different situation from much of what we have seen in the last few weeks—largely peaceful protests with violent behavior at the fringes,” sometimes by people who “are there to disrupt the protest,” she said.
Abu El-Haj’s words were echoed by John Inazu, a professor at the Washington University at St. Louis School of Law, who recently wrote an article decrying the overuse of unlawful-assembly laws as “social control.”Over time, he argued, local governments have lost sight of the idea that protest is presumptively protected, and have rewritten unlawful-assembly laws to permit the government to shut down even peaceful protests when they find them inconvenient. Last year in The Atlantic, Inazu noted:
Local officials too frequently end protests prematurely or move them to distant locations where they will be less effective. Lawmakers overregulate nonviolent groups that resist majoritarian norms. And many Americans cede too easily to the demands of conformity rather than pursuing and protecting alternative visions of society.
In an interview last week, Inazu told me that many local officials also pay no political or legal price for stopping protests prematurely. “The ability to overpolice or shut down the protests when they should be allowed to continue really advances the objectives of local government.”
Courts have done little to intervene in these choices, he said; there is “virtually no [legal] doctrine on the right of assembly.” Courts should require local governments to show that real disorder is imminent, rather than allowing premature shutdowns, he argued. “Local governments have to take some degree of risk” of disorder before eliminating protests, rather than using unlawful assembly as a phrase meaning “inconvenient.”
The withering of the right to assemble may flow from public attitudes, which have not been particularly tolerant of protest and have become far less tolerant recently. That’s the view of Timothy Zick, a professor at the William & Mary Law School, who has been writing for a decade on regional variation in interpretations of the First Amendment, including local regulation of where people may assemble. Zick notes that many localities now levy hefty charges against protesters to pay for the cost of policing them; many people, he says, find that a reasonable idea, even though it may make even the most determinedly nonviolent citizens, faced with potentially ruinous costs, forswear any public activity. And others have suggested that protests at night are suspicious in themselves. Why is that? Zick asks. “The First Amendment applies when the sun goes down. It doesn’t take a nap.”
Last month, the former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele suggested that the Portland protesters should prevent criticism from Donald Trump by moving their protests away from the federal courthouse.
Groups of mothers form a wall to protect protesters in Portland, Ore. in July (Alex Lourie / Redux)
Clever, eh? If the government abuses you, go somewhere you won’t make the government mad. That idea, to my mind, stands the ideals of free speech and assembly on their head. The federal courthouse—where federal power is publicly displayed and exercised—is the kind of place where protests, by logic and history, are supposed to take place. When the people assemble in such a place, the government should not greet them right away with militarized threat of force. It should not ever remove them unless it has first made a serious effort to protect their right to be heard—and to separate the violent from the peaceable. And government officials, such as the president and the attorney general, should not be in the business of slandering and misrepresenting the majority of the peaceable.
Demands that protesters “denounce violence” also miss the point. Emerson Sykes, one of the American Civil Liberties Union attorneys challenging the protest ban in Graham, North Carolina, points out that the protests in America represent “a historic moment”—a challenge to ingrained brutality and racism in our police and justice systems. Protesters who themselves commit no crimes have the right to focus on that aim; ritual self-purification is an inappropriate demand—particularly in 2020. A government that itself cannot denounce neo-Nazis invading state capitals has no standing to demand that others apologize for the sins of third parties.
And that takes me back to Selma. It seems like distant history. Yet today, in America, people are in the street fighting for the very same things that the marchers on Bloody Sunday wanted—an end to police violence and free elections. The real scandal is that these basic values remain under siege more than half a century after blood ran on that Alabama bridge.
I watched Weinstein’s Youtube discussion of the mRNA vaccine with Robert Malone. As a physician, I didn’t find his discussion particularly convincing, nor that of Dr. Malone. Three or four hundred million people have now been vaccinated and we are not seeing a lot of serious side effects, which we would almost have certainly seen by now if there really was a problem. The issue, as I see it, is that Weinstein is making a living with his Youtube channel and obviously, he is motivated to increase his income by generating controversy. There’s a heck of a lot of content on Youtube and careful, well-reasoned discussion probably would generate less income than outlandish claims. As a physician, I’m used to reading medical journals and I have enough statistical training to evaluate the evidence. That’s not true for the majority of people exposed to this kind of programming. I’d have found Weinstein’s program a lot more interesting if he had brought on an active mRNA researcher to debate Dr. Malone. (I don’t think Dr. Malone is “in his dotage” at age 60, but he’s clearly not involved with this kind of work anymore.) Weinstein is a smart guy, but he’s not a physician, and not a virologist. His show needs to be a little more balanced if he wants to be taken seriously.
Check out Dr John Campbell , https://youtube.com/c/Campbellteaching he has over 1 million subs, talks about ivermectin all the time and is not demonetized. Why? Because of how he frames it, he is also a believer in vaccines.
Bret on the other hand has gone full Alex Jones with a messiah complex to boot! He has lost the fucking plot completely. Nothing he says makes sense anymore, it’s full on global conspiracy shit. He takes ivermectin live on air.. says he is not getting vaccinated but using ivermectin prophylacticly?.. it’s just totally over the top for a public channel and asking to be demonetized.
I think the reason there’s very little effort going into figuring out if ivermectin works is because we have vaccines that work so well and the fact that so many people got burned promoting early alternative treatments that turned out to be bullshit like hydroxychloroquine…. But I’m sure I’m wrong and Bret is the savior of humanity battling against big tech and the globalists behind the great reset! Maybe he should try and build back betterer his channel.