YouTube, and its parent company Google, have been moved to the Red List of the Children’s Union’s traffic light system of child welfare, signalling that they pose a grave and immediate threat to the welfare of children.

The decision follows repeated censorship of content, posted on the platform, aimed at protecting children and saving lives. 

The Red-List is part of traffic light system to indicate to parents whether an organisation behaves in a responsible way with regards to children, or endangers them. 

In an open letter sent today to Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, and to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, the Children’s Union details the channel’s policy failings, as well as offering the opportunity to appeal against the decision. 

The letter draws attention to the internal conflicts within YouTube’s own Covid policies, and its arrogant and foolish censorship of genuine experts.

It reads:

“What you are actually doing is no different to putting your hand over the mouth of medical experts – people who have spent their whole careers trying to save lives – gagging them just when they are raising the alarm on behalf of children’s safety.”

“As YouTube has so risibly demonstrated, even an Internet colossus with all its resources, is incapable of determining even an internally coherent ‘truth’. Its overt deference to authority is surely proof that it simply does not know.”

Among its recommendation, the Children’s Union proposes that YouTube “review and revise all [its] policies on the basis that [it] has no reliable mechanism for distinguishing fact from fiction.”

Commenting on the decision, Ross Butler said, “These Silicon Valley giants believe that any opinion, no matter how informed or evidence-based, that erodes trust in ‘the authorities’ is dangerous and must be censored. Such opinions are dangerous, but only to incompetent authorities. Of which, YouTube is one.

“Between them, YouTube and Google have become the largest sources of misinformation in the world, cravenly upholding only authorised positions, no matter how internally inconsistent or empirically false.

“When a technology company can decide whether a highly experienced paediatrician or professor of immunology is allowed to speak or not, that company is a threat to children everywhere. So today, YouTube is red-listed.”

A member of the Children’s Union read the letter out in a live video that was published on YouTube and its competitor Odysee. The Odysee version is available to watch below –