Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has filed a lawsuit against YouTube’s parent company Google over the streaming platform’s repeated efforts to censor him.
Kennedy’s lawsuit was filed Wednesday and accuses Google of violating his First Amendment rights.
RFK Jr. contends his speeches and interviews were expunged inappropriately from the platform, despite his status as a candidate in the 2024 election.
Kennedy is the lead challenger to President Joe Biden in the Democrat primary.
However, as the presidential primary elections loom, RFK Jr. predicts that the censorship efforts will persist as the establishment colludes to cut him off from voters.
Examples of YouTube’s censorship include Kennedy’s speech at Saint Anselm College, as well as his interviews with Jordan Peterson and Mike Tyson, all of which were deleted by the platform.
The lawsuit argues these content removals are a blatant disregard for his constitutional rights and echo a worrying trend of suppression across the breadth of the campaign.
Kennedy’s legal argument centers on allegations of overreach and the weaponization of government.
The lawsuit condemns the Biden administration for orchestrating a censorship campaign attempt to silence dissenting voices.
“This complaint concerns the freedom of speech and the extraordinary steps the United States government has taken under the leadership of Joe Biden to silence people it does not want Americans to hear,” the filing states.
It also underscores that Kennedy is far from the only casualty in this censorship campaign.
Nevertheless, Kennedy’s case stands out given his ongoing challenge to President Biden for the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket.
“Although YouTube is a private (non-governmental) party, it violated Mr. Kennedy’s First Amendment rights when it removed videos of his political speech, as alleged above, in several ways,” the complaint reads.
“First, there is a sufficiently close nexus between YouTube and the federal government such that YouTube’s actions may be fairly treated as that of government itself.
“For example, although it cited its own Covid vaccine misinformation policies when censoring Mr. Kennedy, the policies rely entirely on government officials to decide what information gets censored.
“They say that YouTube does not allow people to say anything ‘that contradicts local health authorities’ (LHA) or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19.’
“These policies are subject to change, but only ‘in response to changes to global or local health authorities’ guidance on the virus.’
“In other words, the government provides the rules that guide YouTube’s enforcement of the medical misinformation policies.”
RFK Jr. has faced accusations of promoting vaccine “misinformation” throughout the pandemic.
These allegations also motivated Facebook’s parent company Meta to ban him from its Instagram platform for a significant period.
Meanwhile, his vaccine-related comments in corporate media interviews are often edited out.
Kennedy’s legal struggle with YouTube also includes an injunction request to forestall the platform from further censoring his content.
READ MORE: RFK Jr Warns: Government Censorship Is a ‘License for Any Atrocity’
