YouTube suspended popular news channel The Hill for playing a clip of former President Donald Trump arguing the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
YouTube channel The Hill was suspended and will not be able to upload videos for seven days. The morning show, “Rising,” violated policies when it posted two clips of Trump denying the validity of the results of the election. New videos cannot be posted during the suspension but older videos can still be accessed.
“We covered former President Trump’s remarks about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Rising’s Twitter account said. “In a soundbite, he repeated his claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Our discussion focused on what Trump said about Putin and did not explicitly rebut claims of election fraud.”
The clips in question featured Trump speaking with News host Laura Ingraham and attributing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the election results, as well as raw footage of Trump speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he continued to deny the validity of the election results.
“It’s hard to understand how the cause of fighting misinformation could be well-served by punishing news channels that educate viewers about what their political leaders are saying,” Rising host Robby Soave said.
YouTube policy communications manager Ivy Choi confirmed that the channel had been suspended for posting content in violation of YouTube’s policies.
“We removed content from and issued a strike to this channel for violating our election integrity policy, and as a result, this channel is suspended from publishing new videos or live streams for seven days,” Choi said. “We do allow for content with sufficient educational, documentary, scientific or artistic context, which the removed content did not contain.”
Soave addressed the suspension in an article for Reason, saying that YouTube’s expansive election integrity policy “effectively outlaws straight news reporting on YouTube.”
“It is one thing for YouTube to ban people who are making false claims,” Soave wrote. “It is quite another for YouTube to prohibit people from educating their viewers about the reality that the former president is still spreading these false claims.”
