Neil Oliver says alternative views on Covid were 'silenced' with 'Kafkaesque' rules

YouTube's parent company Alphabet has announced plans to offer reinstatement to accounts permanently suspended for breaching pandemic and election-related policies.
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Neil Oliver has accused YouTube of censoring debate around Covid by removing videos and striking channels "without explanation".
The broadcaster said creators were left in a "Kafkaesque" situation, punished for alleged misinformation but never told what rule they had broken.
The comments come as YouTube's parent company Alphabet announced plans to offer reinstatement to accounts permanently suspended for breaching pandemic and election-related policies.
The streaming service revealed this decision in correspondence to the US House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, following an extensive Republican-led inquiry.
Neil Oliver said the platform issued strikes against creators who discussed alternative perspectives
|GB NEWS
Mr Oliver said the platform issued strikes against creators who discussed alternative perspectives, whilst refusing to clarify which guidelines had been breached.
Speaking on GB News, Bev Turner asked: "Your own YouTube channel has never been cancelled, has it? You’ve just had certain videos taken down.
"And what kind of logic were you given by YouTube at the time? Were they clear about what you might have contravened?"
Mr Oliver replied: "There was always this fear on the part of the content producers that YouTube would censor or take things down.
"Always this idea that if you got three strikes against you, you were out. It was positively Kafkaesque.
"On my own channel, in my own use of the platform, you would get a strike against a video, something demonetised, or content taken down.
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"And when we approached YouTube and said, in the interests of being responsible creators, 'What was wrong with this content?
"Where did we go wrong? What was the line? What was the allegation? What was the misinformation?'
"The invariable reply you’d get back from YouTube was essentially: 'Why don’t you go and have another look at your own content and see if you can work out for yourself what you did wrong?'
"So you were in that Kafkaesque position: convicted of a crime, but your accuser wouldn’t tell you what crime you had committed. And that goes on to this day."
Mr Oliver described it as a 'Kafkaesque position' as he told Bev Turner about the silencing
|GB NEWS
"That irritating blue barrier still appears under anything you put up about Covid, insisting that after all, there was an official narrative and that really is what you should be listening to."
Alphabet's legal representative, Daniel Donovan, stated in the letter that the video platform would "provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the company terminated their channels for repeated violations of Covid-19 and election integrity policies that are no longer in effect."
Alphabet acknowledged in its submission that the streaming service experienced governmental demands to eliminate material that didn't breach its established guidelines.
The technology giant characterised such official influence over content decisions as "unacceptable and wrong," asserting that it had "consistently fought against those efforts on free speech grounds".