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Big Tech Scrubs Religious Radio Show From YouTube

This isn't the first time YouTube has infringed on free speech
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YouTube removed an entire radio show from its platform this week, hosted by popular Christian author and social commentator Eric Metaxas, citing violations of their community standards.

Metaxas – author of biographies on the lives of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther, and William Wilberforce, among many other books – announced the news to his social media pages on Tuesday.

“It’s happened,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “Despite our going FAR out of our way to comply with their arbitrary ‘community standards’, YouTube decided to remove every single video we’ve ever done on the Eric Metaxas Show off their platform.”

Eric Metaxas

The Eric Metaxas Radio Show, humorously called “The Show About Everything”, has featured a host of big name guests, including former NFL star Tim Tebow, Hollywood actors such as Jim Caveziel and Gary Sinise, the controversial Milo Yiannopoulos, and Discovery’s own Stephen Meyer. Theologians, actors and actresses, journalists, musicians, filmmakers, and politicians alike have appeared on the show over the years.

Now if you were to search for “The Eric Metaxas Radio Show” on YouTube, you would be directed to a blank page with a single red banner that reads, “This account has been terminated for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”

According to Metaxas, the channel had 215,000 followers before it was taken down. Metaxas still retains his personal YouTube channel which features his own media appearances and lectures.

Metaxas has told his followers that he did his “very best to comply with their creepy Marxist ‘community standards,'” but that YouTube has been seeking a route to push them out for a long while now.

The show’s digital media producer, Chris Himes, told the Washington Times that they were banned after receiving three strikes within a 90-day period. The most recent strike was for violating YouTube’s “medical misinformation policy” when an April episode featuring Naomi Wolf was posted. Wolf is a bestselling author and journalist, former political advisor on the presidential campaigns of both Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and an outspoken critic of the lockdown policies during COVID-19.

In one famous tweet, she wrote that she never would have voted for Joe Biden if she knew he intended to carry on with the lockdowns.

Selective censorship based on political and religious affiliation has been a fast-growing concern over the past year, with many states like Florida and Texas introducing legislation that would protect social media users from unfair censorship practices.

Last year, YouTube removed an interview with Scott Atlas, a neuro-radiologist and Stanford University Medical Center professor. In the video, Atlas had expressed his concern that the COVID-19 lockdowns were harmful. YouTube claimed the video violated its terms of service and took it down.

In 2019, PragerU took YouTube to court for placing their videos on a “restricted status”, claiming that the platform was engaging in unfair practices and violating the First Amendment.

“The loss to us is financially devastating,” Metaxas wrote to Facebook. He is asking all of his followers to find his content on Rumble and Frank (Mike Lindell’s new “free speech” platform) and to subscribe to his newsletter.

While Big Tech and politicians in their favor continue to push for the censorship of unpopular and controversial ideas under the guise of protecting the populace, others continue to champion a free marketplace of ideas, despite the inevitable sharing of misinformation or wrong ideas.

Dominic Lawson, for instance, recently took Richard Dawkins to task for arguing that bringing a Down’s Syndrome child into the world is “immoral.” Lawson argued that Dawkins is wrong, but defended his right to speak his mind.

Dawkins should not, said Lawson, “be prevented from expressing those discreditable opinions (which, by the way, are commonplace, if not usually expressed so tactlessly). The way to deal with them is…to subject them to rational discussion and debate.”


Caitlin Cory

Communications Coordinator, Discovery Institute
Caitlin Cory is the Communications Coordinator for Discovery Institute. She has previously written for Discovery on the topics of homelessness and mental illness, as well as on Big Tech and its impact on human freedom. Caitlin grew up in the Pacific Northwest, graduated from Liberty University in 2017 with her Bachelor's in Politics and Policy, and now lives in Maryland with her husband.

Big Tech Scrubs Religious Radio Show From YouTube