3 years ago313Two days after the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol driven by false claims the presidential election was rigged, Google’s video-streaming platform YouTube is hosting a video in which President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani alleges the election was stolen.
Giuliani’s claims came Friday during a live-stream broadcast of former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s “War Room” program, which has more than 330,000 subscribers. Shortly after referring to “the stealing of the election,” Giuliani said of Trump supporters who gathered Wednesday to protest the election results at the Capitol building, “They keep being told you can’t say there was fraud. They know there was fraud.”
YouTube on Thursday had said on Twitter that over the previous month it had removed “thousands of videos which spread misinformation claiming widespread voter fraud changed the result of the 2020 election, including several videos President Trump posted to his channel.” The company added that as of Thursday, any YouTube channels “posting new videos with false claims in violation of our policies” would receive a “strike,” which triggers a temporary suspension from posting or streaming. “Channels that receive three strikes in the same 90-day period will be permanently removed from YouTube,” the company tweeted.
Google did not immediately answer questions about why the video, streamed at 8 a.m. was allowed to stay up. As of noon, it remained on YouTube, and had been viewed nearly 80,000 times. In response to questions from this news organization, a Google spokesman asked for a link to the video and for a time stamp of when in the broadcast the claims occurred.
The Washington, D.C. protest, fueled by false claims spread by Trump and others that the presidential election was rigged, was followed by a storming of police barricades and invasion of the seat of the U.S. government that led to the deaths of five people, including Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, killed by a blow from a fire extinguisher to the head.
Social media companies including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been widely criticized for allowing false claims of election fraud to spread.
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