(Covered by
DailyKos and
thegatewaypundit, with predictably different slants.)
Over the weekend, YouTube deleted the "Health Ranger" channel,
citing violation of YouTube's Community Guidelines. The Natural News channel is run by Mike Adams, who is
unsurprisingly outraged, claiming violation of the 1st Amendment:
"We have now entered the Twilight Zone, and the tyrants in charge are left-wing lunatics who are, without exception,
totalitarians who despise dissenting views. As they are demonstrating by the hour, they are more than willing to exploit their positions of power to silence their political opposition and destroy the subscriber audiences of alternative authors or journalists. Make no mistake that this is all a prelude to a massive false flag event that I have described as “The Mother of all False Flags.”
It is not the first time Google and YouTube have been
accused of targeting conservative content.
Adams has repeatedly been criticized as a purveyor of pseudoscience for his various claims, which include vaccine denialism and the alleged vaccines-autism link, AIDS/HIV denialism, quack cancer treatments, and conspiracy theories about "Big Pharma". As David Gorski, MD Ph.D.
summarized on Science-Based Medicine:
"I still don't know whether Adams really and truly believes in the nonsense he promotes. I really don't and still can't tell. For example, did Adams relocate to Ecuador because he really believes in the "natural" lifestyle or did he do it to escape those pesky laws in the U.S. that frown on selling unproven remedies. I do know, however, that Adams appears to have an utter contempt for his own readers, as evidenced by his repeating outrageous straw men such as the claim that
SBM says that susceptibility to disease is totally random and that there's nothing anyone can do about it and bizarre falsehoods like his claim in the Vaccine Zombie video above that vaccines can make your testicles fall off."
As far as the claim that this move by YouTube is a violation of the 1st Amendment:
