Why Sky News has been banned from YouTube
The Sky News Australia YouTube channel has 1.85 million subscribers and had posted several videos which denied the existence of Covid-19 or encouraged people to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to prevent it or treat it. YouTube stated these videos violated its medical misinformation policies.
YouTube imposed the ban last Thursday, the day after the Daily Telegraph ended Alan Jones’s regular column after there had been controversy about his Covid-19 commentary where he called the New South Wales chief health officer, Kerry Chant, a village idiot on his Sky News program.
The Guardian Australia reported that News Corp informed them the termination of Jones’s column did not mean the company does not support the broadcaster.
The ban by YouTube will impact the revenue Sky News’s earns from Google, which started when News Corp signed a partnership with Google in February under the media bargaining code.
The ban from YouTube was revealed on the same day as Sky launched a new free-to-air channel Sky News Regional across regional Australia.
The channel carries all the Sky After Dark commentators, including Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin and Jones, as well as a new three-hour breakfast show.
Videos from Sky News that did not violate policies and were posted before Thursday are still online. If an organisation is banned – or issued a strike such as this one – three times in the same 90-day period, this results in a channel being permanently removed from YouTube.
A YouTube spokesperson told the Guardian Australia: “We have clear and established Covid-19 medical misinformation policies based on local and global health authority guidance, to prevent the spread of Covid-19 misinformation that could cause real-world harm.”
“We apply our policies equally for everyone regardless of uploader, and in accordance with these policies and our long-standing strikes system removed videos from and issued a strike to Sky News Australia’s channel.
“Specifically, we don’t allow content that denies the existence of Covid-19 or that encourages people to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus. We do allow for videos that have sufficient countervailing context, which the violative videos did not provide.”
YouTube’s decisive action is in stark contrast to the response from local media regulators such as the Australian Communications and Media Authority or the subscription television body, Astra.
Sky News Australia said it “expressly rejects” claims that any hosts ever denied the existence of Covid-19 and that “no such videos were ever published or removed”.
“We support broad discussion and debate on a wide range of topics and perspectives which is vital to any democracy,” Sky News Australia spokesperson told the Guardian Australia.
Sky’s YouTube channel has grown in two years from 70,000 subscribers to 1.85 million, which is higher than ABC News or any other local media company.
One of the most popular videos, with 4.6m views, is Jones’s “Australians must know the truth – this virus is not a pandemic”, which was posted at the height of the pandemic last year. YouTube is an important platform for Sky News and the more extreme the video, the more popular it is.