“Have a look at Sky News YouTube, Sky News Facebook and Alan Jones Facebook and you can see,” Jones told his viewers. YouTube is an important platform for Sky News and the more extreme the video, the more popular it is.Įarlier this week after he was dumped by the Daily Telegraph, Jones, 80, pointed to his success on the platform. The video was removed and a lengthy apology was published on the Sky News website. On 19 July, Sky News was forced to apologise for a Jones interview with MP Craig Kelly in which they claimed the Delta variant is not dangerous and vaccines won’t help you. One of the most popular videos, with 4.6m views, is Jones’s “Australians must know the truth – this virus is not a pandemic”, which was posted at the height of the pandemic last year. Sky’s YouTube channel has grown in two years from 70,000 subscribers to 1.85m, which is higher than ABC News or any other local media company. “We take our commitment to meeting editorial and community expectations seriously.” “We support broad discussion and debate on a wide range of topics and perspectives which is vital to any democracy,” a Sky News Australia spokesperson said. The broadcaster said “a review of old videos published to the channel” had uncovered material that did not comply with YouTube’s policies. Sky News Australia said it “expressly rejects” claims that any hosts ever denied the existence of Covid-19 and that “no such videos were ever published or removed”. “At this stage we will wait to see how complaints are handled by the broadcaster under the co-regulatory system.” “The Acma is aware of the broadcasts and various concerns raised about them,” a spokesman told Guardian Australia. Neither the Australian Communications and Media Authority nor the subscription television body, Astra, took any action when informed of Jones’s Covid broadcast on Monday. YouTube’s decisive action is in stark contrast to the response from local media regulators. We do allow for videos that have sufficient countervailing context, which the violative videos did not provide.” “Specifically, we don’t allow content that denies the existence of Covid-19 or that encourages people to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus. “We apply our policies equally for everyone regardless of uploader, and in accordance with these policies and our long-standing strikes system, removed videos from and issued a strike to Sky News Australia’s channel. “We have clear and established Covid-19 medical misinformation policies based on local and global health authority guidance, to prevent the spread of Covid-19 misinformation that could cause real-world harm,” a YouTube spokesperson told Guardian Australia. Three strikes in the same 90-day period will result in a channel being permanently removed from YouTube. Videos that did not violate policies and were posted before Thursday are still online. The channel carries all the Sky After Dark commentators, including Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin and Jones, as well as a new three-hour breakfast show. The strike was revealed on the same day as Sky launched a new free-to-air channel Sky News Regional across regional Australia. What a damning indictment on our political and media landscape that this extremist, conspiratorial, racist news channel is still considered normal and acceptable.
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