Republicans Compete to See Who Can Get Banned for COVID Conspiracies First
With Joe Biden’s administration warring with Facebook over COVID misinformation, this week two other massive social-media platforms laid down the law. Republican Senator Rand Paul was suspended from YouTube for a week, the New York Times reported Wednesday, over a now-removed video in which the Kentucky lawmaker falsely claimed that masks are ineffective in curbing the spread of COVID-19—an assessment that flies in the face of the “near-unanimous recommendations of public health experts.”
Paul’s three-minute video fit neatly into the category of “claims that masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of Covid-19”—one of many forms of content banned under YouTube’s COVID-19 medical misinformation policy. “We apply our policies consistently across the platform, regardless of speaker or political views, and we make exceptions for videos that have additional context such as countervailing views from local health authorities,” a spokesperson for the company told the Times.
Paul is presumably well aware of YouTube’s guidelines, given that he first violated them last week. YouTube removed a video from his channel in which he claimed “there’s no value” in wearing masks and issued a warning, as is protocol for a first offense. The second offense did not occasion a sudden moment of clarity for Paul, as it turns out:
Paul’s misinformation comes at a time when his GOP colleagues in Texas and Florida—which together reportedly make up 1 in 3 new COVID cases in the U.S.—“appear to be duking it out to see who can infect more children,” as my colleague Bess Levin put it earlier this week. In Florida, which is currently shattering single-day records for new cases and hospitalizations, Governor Ron DeSantis is threatening to withhold the pay of superintendents and school board members who go against his executive order banning mask mandates for schools. In Texas, health systems are so overwhelmed that Governor Greg Abbott is seeking out-of-state assistance. Abbott’s ban on mask mandates—which a county judge this week dealt a temporary blow to— nevertheless remains in place, as does the state’s new, unhinged guidance for schools.
Speaking of unhinged, the House’s favorite conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene was also handed a week-long suspension from Twitter on Tuesday after she tweeted that the Food and Drug Administration “should not approve the covid vaccines” and claimed the shots are not effective. The Georgia representative’s tweet “was labeled in line with our COVID-19 misleading information policy,” a Twitter spokesperson told CNN, noting that her account “will be in read-only mode for a week due to repeated violations of the Twitter Rules.” It’s not Greene’s first Twitter-misinformation rodeo, either; it’s at least her third, according to CNN. She was recently suspended for amplifying vaccine lies, and before that election lies. The congresswoman was also mistakenly suspended for a few hours in March in what the company said was an error made by one of its automated systems.
“Twitter declined to say how many times Greene has violated the company’s rules,” CNN reports, but a 7-day account lock is Twitter’s response to users who’ve accrued four strikes, according to their policy, which suggests the lawmaker is only a few misleading tweets away from permanent suspension territory. A seemingly resigned Greene took to Facebook to face the music: “I’ve been banned again.”
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