YouTube Defends Conservative Creators Against NYTimes Hit Piece

The New York Times' Nico Grant reached out to prominent YouTubers last week to inquire about the "election misinformation" beleaguered far-left media watchdog Media Matters had claimed to have found in their videos. 

The PostMillenial website reports Grant also reached out to YouTube for his article. The platform said that "none of the 286 videos violated its community guidelines." YouTube further told The Times that "what's important to use is that we're representing a broad spectrum of views."

Grant asked Tucker Carlson, Tim Pool, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Benny Johnson, and the Babylon Bee, among others about those videos before digging into their relationship with YouTube, asking "Are you a member of the YouTube Partner Program? If so, how frequently does YouTube demonetize your videos? Has YouTube sent you messages, emails or notices in the last year that your content contains misinformation?" When reached for comment, most of those commentators responded with some variation on "f*ck you" and posted the correspondence on X.

YouTube had once had restrictions against so-called election misinformation but those restrictions were lifted. Others have not been. Grant blasted YouTube for what he said was their decision to "stop fighting the most persistent strain of election misinformation in the United States: the falsehood that President Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald J. Trump."

And he boosted Media Matters, which is a far-left media "watchdog" that is currently facing lawsuits both from Elon Musk's X and from the state of Missouri. The Times claims that Media Matters "monitors information from conservative sources" and "examined the consequences" of YouTube's cessation of election information censorship. Grant admits that Media Matters "is a partisan organization," but said that The Times "independently verified the research."

The Times went after not only the YouTubers, but the platform, saying that "YouTube generated revenue from more than a third of those videos by placing ads before or during them." Those commentators included Rudy Giuliani, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Kash Patel, and others.

With their refusal to remove the videos, The Times posits that YouTube, "in this presidential contest," has "acted as a megaphone for conspiracy theories."