Censorship Industrial Complex
Quebec court greenlights class action suit against YouTube’s COVID-related content censorship
From LifeSiteNews
The lawsuit, led by video blogger Éloïse Boies, argues YouTube violated freedom of expression under the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms by censoring COVID-related content.
A class action lawsuit against YouTube’s censorship of COVID-era speech on the platform has been allowed to proceed in Canada.
The primary plaintiff in the case which has now been greenlit by the Quebec Superior Court is YouTuber Éloïse Boies, while the filing accuses the Google video platform of censoring information about vaccines, the pandemic, and the virus itself.
A copy of the order can be found HERE.
READ: Elon Musk skewers Trudeau gov’t Online Harms bill as ‘insane’ for targeting speech retroactively
Boies, who runs the “Élo Wants to Know” channel, states in the lawsuit that three of her videos got removed by YouTube (one of the censored videos was about… censorship) for allegedly violating the website’s policies around medical disinformation and contradicting World Health Organization and local health authorities’ COVID narratives of the time.
However, the content creator claims that the decisions represented unlawful and intentional suppression of free expression. In February, Boies revealed that in addition to having videos deleted, the censorship also branded her an “antivaxxer” and a “conspiracy theorist,” causing her to lose contracts.
The filing cites the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms as the document YouTube violated, while the class-action status of the lawsuit stems from it including any individual or legal entity in Quebec whose videos dealing with COVID got censored, or who were prevented from watching such videos, starting in mid-March 2020 and onward.
Google, on the other hand, argues that it is under no obligation to respect the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, and can therefore not be held accountable for decisions to censor content it doesn’t approve of – or as the giant phrased it, provide space for videos “regardless of their content.”
But when Superior Court Judge Lukasz Granosik announced his decision, he noted that freedom of expression “does not only mean freedom of speech, but also freedom of publication and freedom of creation.”
Stressing the importance that Canada’s Supreme Court assigns to guaranteed freedom of expression as a key building block in a democratic society, the judge concluded that “If (Google) carries out censorship by preventing certain people from posting videos and prevents other people from viewing these same videos, it thus hinders the free circulation of ideas and exposes itself to having to defend its ways of doing things.”
Google was ordered to stop censoring content because it contradicts health authorities, WHO, or governments, pay $1,000 in compensation, and $1,000 in punitive damages to each of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, as well as “additional compensation provided for by law since the filing of the request for authorization to take collective action, as per the court’s decision.”
As for those who were prevented from accessing content, the decision on damages will be the subject of a future hearing.
Reprinted with permission from Reclaim The Net.
PayPal’s internal documents reveal a politically charged decision-making process behind Covid-era account closures.
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It seemed pretty obvious as it was happening – but now there appears to be proof that PayPal was punishing users for their Covid-era speech that didn’t align with official narratives.
One of the critics of pandemic mandates that got “debanked” is UsForThem founder Molly Kingsley, who has been told by PayPal that her account got frozen because it was used to receive donations, and that was found to be outside the payment giant’s “acceptable use” rules. The parent campaign group and Kingsley were vocal critics of obligatory Covid vaccination of children, forcing them to wear face masks, as well as school closures. And now PayPal has spelled it out. The Telegraph reported the account was terminated because of “content published by UsForThem relating to mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations and school closures.” PayPal had to reinstate the account less than a month after it was shut down in September 2022 because UK’s financial regulator FCA intervened. This was not the only account targeted, that belonged to groups and individuals opposed to Covid restrictions, but when they got shut down, PayPal chose not to officially explain why. Among those affected was Toby Young, a free speech advocate who’s Daily Skeptic blog was critical of Covid mandates, as well as lawyers gathered in the Law or Fiction group who shared similar views, and said that depriving them of access to their money on PayPal was a China-style “blatant assault on free speech.” The information PayPal has come out with now regarding UsForThem and Kingsley was revealed in (legal) pre-action phase documents, which also show that the company spent four months leading up to the September 2022 account freeze putting together “a dossier of information about Kingsley.” That dossier included quotes from her book, The Children’s Inquiry. Around the same time, the UK’s Counter Disinformation Unit – known for trying to suppress speech about lockdowns that was skeptical of the official line – was carrying out surveillance of Kingsley’s social media activity. PayPal is now refusing to comment on what it calls “individual customer accounts” but the company claims its approach is objective and not politics-driven. However, Kingsley believes that PayPal “appears to have admitted what we had suspected all along: that it was engaged in politically motivated debankings of those of us who criticized the government’s response to Covid, and the lockdown narrative in particular.” “For more than two years, PayPal has resisted my efforts to uncover what happened,” the campaigner added. |
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