Google, the owner of YouTube, said it removed LifeSite for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policy, including for “content that promotes prevention methods that contradict local health authorities or WHO.” The group’s channel had reached more than 300,000 subscribers, with an average of over 50,000 views on its main show and more than 2 million viewers on some shows.
On its COVID-19 and vaccines policy page, Facebook states, “We remove claims that deny the existence of the disease or undermine the severity of COVID-19.” It also says it removes “false claims about how and where COVID-19 can be transmitted and who can be infected.”
Facebook states that “Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts may be removed if they have shared content that violates our COVID-19 and vaccine policies and are also dedicated to sharing other vaccine discouraging information on the platform.”
LifeSiteNews has previously published opinion and commentary that has questioned the gravity of the pandemic and the morality of COVID-19 vaccines.
In December, LifeSiteNews said YouTube deleted its video “in which a prominent Canadian physician protested the ‘unfounded public hysteria’ over COVID-19.”
A Dec. 2 factcheck by the Associated Press said that Hodkinson, the “physician” in the video, was never chairman of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada Examination Committee in Pathology, as had been claimed.
In that video, Hodkinson claimed “masks were utterly useless,” with “no evidence” for their effectiveness. However, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended the use of masks, citing multiple studies.