Prager: Google Censors Video That Exposes Lies About Trump
Dennis Prager is the president of PragerU, a media outlet that makes videos addressing faith, political and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.
In an Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Prager revealed another disturbing instance of censorship by Google and its YouTube subsidiary.
Google is no stranger to such accusations.
It has been the target of allegations of bias from numerous outlets and the subject of multiple congressional inquiries on the same subject.
Charges against the search behemoth include working against fair and democratic elections, manipulating voters in favor of 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and rigging search results to make sure President Donald Trump doesn’t win reelection in 2020.
Leaked documents show Google employees formed “resist” campaigns and called conservatives like Prager and Ben Shapiro “Nazis.”
The most recent instance, and the subject of Prager’s Op-Ed, centers around a video PragerU produced titled “The Charlottesville Lie.”
The video, hosted by CNN contributor Steve Cortes, explains how the media and the left have misled the public about an oft-repeated statement by Trump following the Charlottesville, Virginia, violence in 2017.
Prager’s video argues compellingly that Trump’s now-famous words — “there are good people on both sides” — were not defending racism or white supremacists, a claim often thrown at the president by his detractors.
But shortly after Prager posted the video, Google did what Google does.
“Google placed it on YouTube’s restricted list,” Prager wrote in The Journal. “This happened two weeks after a Senate hearing at which a Google representative swore under oath that the company doesn’t censor based on political views.”
“Conservatives who defend Google or merely oppose any government interference argue that Google is a private company, and private companies are free to publish or not publish whatever they want,” he wrote. “But Google, YouTube and Facebook choose not to be regarded as ‘publishers’ because publishers are liable for what they publish and can be sued for libel.”
Prager explained how the big tech companies want to have their cake and eat it too.
“They want to operate under a double standard,” he wrote, “censoring material that has no indecent content — that is, acting like publishers — while retaining the immunity of nonpublishers. When YouTube puts PragerU’s content on the restricted list, when Twitter bans conservative actor James Woods, they are no longer open forums.”
Some have claimed that Google restricts more left-wing than right-wing videos, but Prager isn’t buying that.
“This is not an apples-to-apples comparison,” he wrote. “When left-wing sites are restricted it is because their videos contain expletives or material truly inappropriate for children, not because they are left-wing. PragerU videos do not contain expletives and are very suitable for children.
“Our videos are restricted only because they are conservative.”
Prager closed his Op-Ed with an admonition to conservatives to be vigilant.
“The unwillingness of some conservatives to confront some of the most dangerous attacks on free speech in American history is disturbing,” he wrote. “Do they think Google, Facebook and Twitter — the conduits of a vast proportion of the free world’s public information — don’t act on their loathing of conservatives?”
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