Here’s a crucial point from Google/YouTube’s warning that it will begin censoring any claims of election fraud in the 2020 election.

“We will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections,” YouTube announced.

YouTube described this censorship policy as “supporting the integrity of the 2020 U.S. election”. 

Protecting the “integrity” of elections had been the pretext for various pre-election crackdowns by Big Tech. The argument then was that protecting the integrity of the election required these monopolies to police “misinformation” that would mislead voters.

That was already a totalitarian rationale. But YouTube’s announcement dramatically moves the goal posts over what protecting election integrity means. The election is over insofar as no one is voting anymore. No amount of information or misinformation is going to affect how someone votes.

So what election integrity is YouTube protecting? 

YouTube describes this as a policy regarding “historical U.S. Presidential elections”. Obviously that’s a lie as none of the Democrat videos alleging that Bush stole  Florida or that Trump was elected by Russian bots are going to be censored. That’s a policy targeted at one election and one political movement. Only.

But the term “historical” when combined with “election integrity” is interesting. 

You can’t protect the “integrity” of “historical” elections because they’re over. The election integrity scam can no longer hide behind protecting voters from information. Instead it’s protecting citizens from information. Or, more accurately, it seeks to protect a government from dissenting political views. 

The whole election integrity argument claimed that elections were so fragile that “misinformation” would mislead voters. Now YouTube is essentially claiming that the country is so fragile that its citizens shouldn’t be exposed to problematic views. The whole idea that this was an emergency policy introduced for the election is falling away and being replaced with the ugly truth that this is meant to be the new normal.