YouTube has suspended Sky News in Australia from posting to their 1.85M followers for allegedly breaching the platform’s Covid misinformation policy. So far, it’s a one-week suspension.
Sky News Australia, which usually publishes dozens of videos a day, hasn’t posted a video for more than two days to the platform. The news channel continues to post as usual to their Facebook page.
The suspension follows the Daily Telegraph canceling Sky News presenter Alan Jones’ column.
Digital Editor Jack Houghton argues YouTube’s decision to suspend Sky News Australia is a disturbing attack on the ability to think freely.
Jack Houghton, the Digital Editor writes:
The freedom to engage in debate and challenge conventional thinking and wisdoms were not always accepted as human rights.
Philosophically the notion has existed for millennia with the most modern interpretations gaining their foothold in Greek debating chambers.
It has changed shape frequently and even been snuffed out by leaders of more totalitarian persuasions.
If a society was lucky, it returned. If not, poverty, starvation and horror tended to follow.
Holodomor, Auschwitz and Mao, are just three historical examples.
So important is your right to communicate freely, without interference, that it was declared a human right in 1948.
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers,” Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads.
Alan Jones Column Dropped from The Daily Telegraph
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