Comedian and commentator Russell Brand called out YouTube Tuesday for punishing individuals for getting COVID facts wrong, when he feels “there’s mainstream media misinformation up all the time.”
“We have been officially censored by YouTube,” Brand declared in a video he shared on Twitter. “They took down one of our videos for misinformation, but why are big media organizations not censored for misinformation in the same way? Is it because YouTube are part of the mainstream media now?”
Brand said a previous video about COVID had been taken down because “we cited information on official government websites, which we misinterpreted.”
He said, “We made an apology video, we’ve taken that down as well, YouTube took down our original video, we’ve taken down the apology video because in case we reiterate the claim while apologizing for it.”
Brand made a case that while he apologized for getting information wrong in a past video, news corporations like MSNBC are permitted to spread misinformation without apparent consequence.
“We made an error, in my opinion a relatively small error, and we’re being penalized! For me that looks like censorship, and the reason I think it looks like censorship is because there’s mainstream media misinformation up all the time,” he said.
He then played a YouTube clip posted March 30, 2021, of MSNBC host Rachel Maddow talking about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccinations.
“Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person,” Maddow said in the clip. “A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus? The virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else.”
While COVID vaccines have been effective in preventing severe outcomes from the virus, they have not prevented people from getting or transmitting the virus. The Centers for Disease Control continues to recommend vaccines as “an important tool to help protect you from severe illness, hospitalization, and death.”
Brand turned the tables and suggested that MSNBC video was a source of medical misinformation.
“That video is up on YouTube right now,” Brand observed. “In my opinion, that’s misinformation.”
