Sometime before midday, YouTube removed a video recording of Tuesday’s council meeting for violating its terms on COVID-19 misinformation. The video-streaming giant didn’t say why. But the meeting featured more than 40 angry members of the public speaking to the council, including one who called the vaccine a “bioweapon” and another who said asymptomatic spread doesn’t exist.
By about 6 p.m., YouTube told the Post-Dispatch it had changed its mind, citing an exception to its rule, when objectionable content is presented along with context from local health authorities and in public forums.
But for those hours, the internet giant’s decision equated the St. Louis County Council meeting with rants from conspiracy theorists, QAnon followers and quack doctors. In recent months, other governments have met the same fate, including a roundtable hosted by the Republican governor of Florida where doctors said children should not wear masks, and a suburban Kansas City school board meeting where speakers said the virus isn’t contagious and that masks cause cancer.
Big U.S. tech companies have been bombarded by criticism for failing to curtail the spread of misinformation. In response, the firms have taken a harder line during the pandemic.
The issue started here last Tuesday, when council members heard from a large and angry crowd before voting to terminate County Executive Sam Page’s controversial mask mandate.
A week later, YouTube issued a warning to the county that the video of the meeting, posted to the County Council's YouTube channel, contained misinformation regarding COVID-19 that could trigger further action, county information technology chief Charles Henderson wrote in an email to council members.
This Tuesday, the council held another meeting with another loud and angry crowd. The next day, YouTube issued what Henderson called a “strike” against the new meeting’s video, and removed it. A second strike, Henderson explained, would result in the County Council’s account being suspended for two weeks. A third in 90 days would get the council banned from the platform.
“I believe that both the warning and the strike are due to statements being made during the Public Forum part of the Council Session,” Henderson said in the email.
“I do not have much hope that an appeal will be successful,” he continued.
YouTube did not respond to questions about which parts of Tuesday’s County Council meeting broke its rules. But plenty of comments could have. After the first speaker finished railing against the “injection bioweapon,” others suggested:
* the COVID-19 pandemic is a “Big Pharma” conspiracy
* the virus cannot be spread by people without symptoms
* face masks cannot block the virus
* there’s no evidence that unvaccinated people are spreading it.
On Thursday, Councilman Mark Harder, R- 7th District, decried YouTube’s decision as “total BS” and “cancel culture” in an email to Henderson.
“This is nothing but censorship,” Harder wrote. “We have no control over any information shared with the council in public comments. How could we possibly police this?”
The video was of a public meeting, where people have a constitutional right to petition their government, he said in an interview later.
“Whose job is it to decide what gets shared there?” he asked. “What happened to freedom of speech? This is a very slippery slope.”
Councilwoman Lisa Clancy, D- 5th District, took the other side.
“They’re a private company — they can do what they want,” she said in a text. “But it’s sad that our meetings have been dominated by a mob of misinformed residents spreading dangerous falsehoods.”
Meanwhile, Henderson, the IT director, was looking for another place to host meeting videos.
“As I suspect that Vaccines are going to be a subject in the Public Forum for some time,” he said in the email, “this will likely continue to be a problem as long as we are on the YouTube platform.”
But by 6 p.m., YouTube had reinstated the video. A spokesperson said in an email YouTube’s misinformation policies generally bar content “that contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s medical information about COVID-19.”
But, the spokesperson said, YouTube has exceptions to allow for content that is “educational, documentary, scientific or artistic” — or when comments are made in public forums.
By day’s end, Henderson said through a county spokesman that there was no longer a need for a YouTube replacement.
The council is scheduled to meet again at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.
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