YouTube pulled a recent interview between Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and former President Donald Trump on Friday for violating the platform’s rules against “misinformation.”
YouTube pulled the latest episode of “Real America with Ronna McDaniel,” an online show featuring McDaniel’s interviews with leading Republicans, from its platform over references that Trump made about the 2020 election.
YouTube informed the RNC about the censorship and a strike against the official GOP YouTube account in an email Friday. In an email obtained by The Daily Wire, YouTube said that the episode was pulled because Trump claimed the 2020 election to be “rigged” without being challenged. YouTube told the RNC that the episode would have been allowed to remain on the platform if “it included sufficient context with countervailing views.” The email said:
I wanted to let y’all know that your video, Real America Season 2, Episode 5: President Donald J. Trump, has been removed from the GOP YouTube channel, because it violated our policies pertaining to elections misinformation and does not contain sufficient EDSA context. Namely, the video contains claims that the 2020 election was “rigged,” with “tremendous voter fraud,” and countervailing views, which we refer to as EDSA context, on those remarks are not provided in the video, audio, title or description.
To clarify, this content would be permitted if it included sufficient context with countervailing views.
As a result, a one-time warning has been applied to the channel. This warning does not restrict your access to YouTube features, but future violations may result in Community Guidelines strikes and restrict feature access. You can find more information about our other Community Guidelines here.
In a statement to The Daily Wire, McDaniel accused YouTube of “censoring conservative opinion” in Big Tech’s campaign against free speech.
“YouTube’s decision to remove a filmed conversation between former President Trump and the Chairwoman of the Republican Party is just the latest example of Big Tech’s chilling approach to censoring conservative opinion,” McDaniel said.
“Silicon Valley oligarchs care more about advancing their political agenda and de-platforming their opponents than they do about free speech,” she continued. “This blatant censorship should concern every American: if they can silence a former President, they can silence any citizen who they view as stepping out of line.”
Trump is not the only politician to have made claims questioning election results in recent years. In a 2019 interview with CBS Sunday Morning, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Trump an “illegitimate president” and claimed the 2016 election “wasn’t on the level.”
“I believe he knows he is an illegitimate president. He knows,” Clinton told host Jane Pauley without pushback. “He knows that there were a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out, and I take responsibility for those parts that I should but, Jane, it was like applying for a job and getting 66 million letters of recommendation and losing to a corrupt human tornado.”
“I know that he knows that this wasn’t on the level. I don’t know that we’ll ever know everything that happened, but clearly we know a lot and we are learning more every day and history will probably sort it all out,” Clinton added.
Clinton’s interview is still available on YouTube. YouTube did not return The Daily Wire’s request for comment.