(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Dissident Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed a lawsuit this week against YouTube parent company Google for censoring content related to his 2024 presidential campaign—accusing the platform of working hand-in-hand with the Biden administration to do so.
“YouTube often removes videos of Mr. Kennedy’s comments from its public platform. It usually relies on its ‘medical misinformation’ policies to justify the action. It has relied on the policies several times to censor interviews and speeches given by Mr. Kennedy during the 2024 presidential campaign,” Kennedy said in his lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday.
“On information and belief, it did so based on statements from the Biden Administration about what information to censor.”
Kennedy did not present smoking-gun proof that YouTube colluded with the Biden regime to suppress his candidacy.
But he pointed to the Twitter Files—a trove of internal records released by new Twitter owner Elon Musk—as evidence that Biden has pressured social media to censor him in the past. Kennedy also cited documents revealed through discovery in the landmark censorship case of Missouri v. Biden—a case RFK recently joined as another plaintiff.
“As documents discovered by two state attorneys general show, federal officials, including White House officials Rob Flaherty and Clarke Humphrey, were the ones who directed tech companies to remove statements Mr. Kennedy made about the government’s COVID policies,” Kennedy said in his lawsuit.
“Although this email targeted Twitter, White House and other government officials repeatedly worked with the big tech companies, including YouTube, to censor Mr. Kennedy during 2021 and 2022,” Kennedy added.
“It is reasonable to believe that this partnership, and the related White House pressure campaign, increased after Mr. Kennedy challenged President Biden for the Democratic Party’s nomination.”
In his lawsuit, Kennedy also floats a novel theory that YouTube is essentially a state actor.
“The federal government has offered such significant encouragement, both overt and covert, that YouTube’s decision to censor Mr. Kennedy’s political speech must be deemed to have been made by the government itself, including Kennedy’s political opponent, President Biden,” he said.
“Under these circumstances, YouTube is a state actor and it violated Mr. Kennedy’s First Amendment rights by engaging in viewpoint discrimination.”
This week’s lawsuit is the latest shot Kennedy’s taken at Big Tech and mainstream media for suppressing free speech.
In March, he filed a massive class-action lawsuit against the Biden administration that can potentially include millions of Americans deprived of accurate news during the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 presidential election.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.