A documentary about the migration crisis in Europe went viral despite YouTube restricting it within 24 hours of its release.
YouTuber and filmmaker Lauren Southern released the #Borderless documentary on May 24. The film centers on the crisis of “massive demographic changes” to Europe as millions fled from hotbeds of terror, violence, war or political unrest in the Middle-East and Africa after the Arab Spring.
In her view, the film is a “fair, reasonable and balanced movie highlighting human trafficking and people smuggling on the ground in nine countries” and addresses questions and ramifications about the mass migration to Europe.
Human Events quoted Southern, “It could be argued this is the most comprehensive documentary ever produced on the issue. No ‘hate speech’, no opinions, just raw footage from on the ground. And it was taken down.”
She had problems throughout the process of releasing this latest film, from uploading to distribution. As Human Events continued, “most of Lauren Southern’s 700,000 subscribers were not notified of the video’s release, as it didn’t appear in timelines or liked videos. It has since been completely removed from YouTube and is now unavailable to watch.”
When it was first censored, she tweeted that she was heartbroken because “our team has put months and months of work into a project just to have it censored by @YouTube.”
“It can’t be a coincidence that it’s not in notifications, shows as deleted, not on my videos list, doesn’t show in recent history,” she added.
Southern uploaded a backup copy, which had more than 600,000 views as of May 28.
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Breitbart Tech observed that this wouldn’t be the first case of a Big Tech company disguising censorship as glitches in order to suppress conservative content. It reported that a leak from Facebook earlier this year revealed that the company uses “forced glitches” against “undesirable” users.
In the months leading up to the release of Southern’s latest documentary, Buzzfeed criticized Southern’s research in refugee camps. A story by Rose Troup Buchanan and Ryan Broderick claimed that her film had “huge implications for the safety and security of both the refugees … and the volunteers [who are working with them].” They condemned Southern for secretly recording NGO workers who appeared to be teaching migrants how to lie. One worker on video said, “I tell them this is acting,” for the purpose of “getting through” the asylum process.
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