Ding-dong, the censor is gone. Susan Wojcicki has announced she is resigning from her position as YouTube CEO where she presided over an era of unprecedented censorship on the video platform.
Wojcicki announced her resignation the day after the House of Representatives issued subpoenas to CEOs of various Big Tech companies, including YouTube’s parent company, Google. The New York Post noted that she was one of Google’s first employees 25 years ago and will reportedly continue as an advisor to Google parent company Alphabet. YouTube’s openly pro-censorship senior advertising and product executive Neal Mohan, will reportedly replace Wojcicki.
Free speech advocates will hardly be disappointed by Wojcicki stepping down, but there are concerns that Mohan could be just as pro-censorship as his predecessor. Mohan previously claimed that YouTube is pro-free speech and its employees aren’t “arbiters of truth” while simultaneously describing YouTube’s community guidelines (i.e. guidelines for censoring content) as “robust.” He has even bragged about the efficency of YouTube’s censorship apparatus.
“YouTube has a long history of silencing conservatives and then making it impossible to appeal their decisions,” Vice President of MRC Free Speech America & MRC Business Dan Schneider said. “It is hard to imagine it picking anyone worse than Wojcicki. But then again Venezuelans picked Marxist Maduro after Hugo Chavez met his maker.”
Wojcicki’s conveniently timed resignation begs the question: Is she worried about being held accountable for Google-owned YouTube’s censorship? Perhaps she should be.
YouTube is one of the most aggressively pro-censorship Big Tech platforms. YouTube Vice President of Government Affairs and Public Policy Leslie Miller boasted during an October 2021 Senate hearing that YouTube had removed over 1 million videos for supposed COVID-19 “misinformation.” Mohan, the new CEO, made the same boast. Later, in August 2022, after multiple claims that YouTube deemed “misinformation” turned out to be credible, YouTube quietly changed its COVID-19 medical misinformation policy. It removed penalties for criticizing government policy and personal practices around masking. The platform also twice censored two days’ worth of CPAC videos, once in March 2022 when it censored CPAC Florida and then again in September when it censored CPAC Texas.
Wojcicki herself touted YouTube’s censorship while speaking at a World Economic Forum (WEF) Davos conference in May 2022. She rambled about the necessity of censoring supposed “misinformation” online.
The CEO has tried to claim allegiance to free speech while also defending her platform’s bias and censorship. For instance, she claimed in a September 2022 interview that YouTube wanted “as much free speech as we possibly can have” and that the platform stands up to pro-censorship governments. In light of recent bombshell allegations that YouTube worked with the U.S. government to censor Americans, this seems disingenuous.
In that same interview, Wojcicki also admitted that YouTube does censor content it deems “undesirable or not supporting society or not being responsible,” which is a vague description of YouTube’s constant censorship.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact YouTube here and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and an equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
