This is what Bellingham, Whatcom did when YouTube removed videos with false COVID claims
YouTube recently disabled — then reinstated — videos of Whatcom County Council and Bellingham City Council meetings over false claims and distortions about the new coronavirus pandemic and COVID-19 vaccines and treatments made by speakers during the open public comment part of the councils’ online sessions.
Those meetings also included false comparisons to the Holocaust that drew criticism from a national anti-hate organization.
Both meeting videos were restored Wednesday, July 21, after an inquiry from The Bellingham Herald about why the videos were removed.
“Upon further review, we’re reinstating the Whatcom County Council’s video,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Herald in an email. “We have policies in place to allow content that might otherwise violate our policies as long as it includes educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic context. In line with our EDSA policies, the video is available again on YouTube.”
YouTube also confirmed that it has restored a Bellingham City Council meeting where speakers offered misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and the pandemic, but that it wasn’t showing on the city channel because it was deleted by the account holder.
“Our community guidelines include policies for medical misinformation about COVID-19,” YouTube told The Herald in an email. “We developed these policies to remove content that poses a serious risk of egregious harm and contradicts local and global health authorities’ guidance about COVID-19 treatment, prevention, transmission, and social distancing. We remove videos that violate our community guidelines, using a mix of machine learning technologies and human evaluators to flag and review content. We make exceptions for content that has sufficient educational, documentary, scientific or artistic context.”
Videos removed
YouTube deleted the Bellingham City Council meeting of July 12 and the Whatcom County Council meeting of June 15, where speakers discussed unapproved treatments for COVID-19 and promoted distortions and lies about the COVID-19 vaccines.
County Councilman Rud Browne posted a screenshot of a message from YouTube to his Facebook page, and the city of Bellingham posted its YouTube warning to the city’s official website.
“Citizens talking to their elected leaders are deemed to be inferior to the artificial intelligence that monitors those communications,” Browne said at the June 29 County Council meeting, where the video’s removal was discussed. “There’s something really, fundamentally wrong.”
Bellingham officials uploaded a statement to the city’s website on July 15, explaining what happened and how the city intends to keep showing unedited versions of its meetings.
“We have created a temporary method for viewing the July 12 meeting that does not rely on YouTube (See July 12 Regular Meeting Action Summary),” the website said.
“We are working to resolve this situation to ensure continued on-demand viewing of City Council meetings. Videos of eight additional regular council meetings, which contain some of the same public comment statements that YouTube flags as ‘medical misinformation,’ were moved by the city from YouTube to an alternative platform to prevent further community guidelines ‘strikes’ by YouTube. These videos remain accessible via meetings.cob.org through an alternative platform,” the city’s website said.
Appeals denied
Bellingham and Whatcom County officials appealed the action by YouTube, a video-sharing and social media platform owned by Google.
Both the city and county appeals were denied, and government officials voluntarily removed other meeting videos over fears that YouTube might disable the accounts for WhatcomCountyGov, City of Bellingham Meetings and the City of Bellingham, Washington.
Those YouTube channels feature dozens of other informational videos on a variety of topics, and officials didn’t want the public to lose access to that content.
False Holocaust comparisons
For several months, some speakers at both the City and County Council meetings have used false and misleading Holocaust analogies and alluded to “crimes against humanity” to rail against pandemic restrictions such as mask mandates, online meetings, business closures and government support for the COVID-19 vaccines.
As hate crimes rise across the U.S., anti-hate groups such as the Anti-Defamation League have criticized claims that distort the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, who from 1933-1945 systematically murdered 6 million Jews and another 6 million gay men, disabled people, Roma, political opponents and Polish and Soviet prisoners of war.
“Anti-COVID measures and anti-vaccination demonstrations have become the hotbeds of Holocaust trivialization and antisemitic conspiracy theories and tropes,” said Miri Cypers, director of the Anti-Defamation League office in Seattle.
“Comparisons to Nazis are deeply offensive and discount the painful history of the Holocaust,” Cypers told The Herald in an email. “Whether this is happening in city halls, state legislatures or the halls of Congress, elected officials have a distinct responsibility to understand the impact of their words and actions.”
Jewish people have been blamed for pandemics dating back centuries, including the Black Death, and antisemitic violence based on such lies have been well-documented by historians.
False medical claims
Whatcom County Health Director Erika Lautenbach told The Herald that she’s particularly troubled by lies and distortions from COVID deniers and vaccine opponents.
“We know people are concerned about vaccine safety and effectiveness, but it’s frustrating as a public health professional to hear people spreading misinformation that runs counter to the recommendations of doctors and scientists and that is demonstrably false,” Lautenbach wrote in an email.
Health Department spokeswoman Scarlett Tang rebutted several of the speakers’ recent claims in an email.
“The COVID-19 vaccines received emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This means they had to meet safety and effectiveness standards similar to a full license, and that they are allowed to be used while the manufacturers collect more long-term data on how long the vaccines will be effective and if there are longer-term side effects. Pfizer and Moderna have both begun the application process for full approval,” Tang said.
“The FDA has approved only one drug, remdesivir, for COVID treatment, and has issued emergency use authorizations for a handful of other treatments,” Tang said.
An anti-parasitic drug for horses called ivermectin is not an approved treatment for COVID-19, according to the FDA website.
First Amendment issue?
Controversy over false statements and other objectionable material have been concerning elected officials who told The Herald that they can’t censor speakers because the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech.
But private companies such as YouTube are within their rights to limit the content that they distribute.
Nevertheless, city and council officials have discussed possible legal action against YouTube.
“These are serious issues,” Councilman Todd Donovan said at the council June 29 meeting. “I’ll support anything that protects free speech.”
Meetings online elsewhere
Digital recordings of Whatcom County Council meetings have always been available at the County Council website through its Legistar software, and so the public didn’t lose access to archived county meetings.
But Bellingham City Council meetings at first were available only on YouTube, said Bellingham spokeswoman Janice Keller.
Now those meetings are online in their entirety through a different web host, Keller told The Herald.
“It was a priority for us to get these meetings online in a place that was not YouTube to meet our transparency goals,” she said.
Public comment canceled
Even so, the Bellingham City Council is not allowing for open public comment at its July 26 meeting, according to the published meeting agenda.
Bellingham City Council President Hannah Stone said the decision to suspend the public comment period was made Wednesday morning, July 21.
“This was the deadline for final preparation of the agenda packet for the upcoming meeting on July 26th,” Stone told The Herald in an email. “This suspension is not a solution but rather a pause to preserve uninterrupted public access to meetings. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, and these protections extend to the council’s public comment period. Accordingly, the council can only implement content-neutral restrictions on public comment.”
Stone said council rules allow the council president to make decisions regarding public comment, and such public comment is not required by state law.
Public comment can be made by mail at 210 Lottie St., Bellingham, WA 98225, by telephone at 360-778-8200, or online at engagebellingham.org.
“Going forward, my aim is to support new opportunities for improved community engagement and increased transparency,” Stone told The Herald.
Bellingham recently began strictly enforcing a time limit of 15 minutes for all open public comment at its meetings, where anyone can discuss any topic for three minutes.
During last winter’s protests over housing for the area’s homeless residents, council members faced the wrath of residents who spoke for an hour or more, leveling personal attacks and uttering profanity.
But the Whatcom County Council won’t be taking that step, Browne told The Herald.
“I disagree strongly with the content. But I did disagree with people actually being censored while talking to their elected representatives,” Browne said.
“I will stay there until 6 o’clock in the morning so everyone feels they’ve had the opportunity to speak to their elected representatives,” he said. “I actually think that’s our highest obligation — to make ourselves available. I don’t know how you do that effectively if you don’t allow for public comment.”
