Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was among those celebrating the return of dangerous political nonsense to YouTube this week.
The far-right Georgia Republican retweeted YouTuber Tim Pool, who in his own tweet remarked favourably on the platform’s loosening of restrictions on sharing known falsehoods that have had dangerous public effects, such as lies about Covid-19. Among the false claims listed explicity by Mr Pool included, “Masks cause brain damage”, “Masks cause lung cancer”, and “COVID-19 no longer exists”.
Ms Greene responded to those claims with a perplexing insistence: “So in other words, allowing some truth back on the platform?”
“Social media companies are going to find themselves in serious trouble in court for violating 1st amendment rights of people who were telling the truth about covid and got censored and banned,” she continued.
The congresswoman’s personal Twitter account was banned earlier this year. At the time, Twitter officials cited “repeated violations of our Covid-19 misinformation policy”. It came in response to Ms Greene falsely claiming that the federal government was ignoring “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths”, citing data from the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
In actuality, there is no scientific reporting method for the data that she cited, which is compiled from public reports and cannot prove any kind of causation.
YouTube also recently banned another popular right-winger, Andrew Tate, for violations of the platform’s hate speech policy.
