YouTube Suspends Rand Paul for One Week After He Lied About the Effectiveness of Mask-Wearing

YouTube has suspended Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) from its platform after he claimed that wearing a mask is an ineffective safeguard against Covid-19.

“This resulted in a first strike on the channel, which means it can’t upload content for a week, per our longstanding three strikes policy,” a YouTube spokesperson told CBS News in a statement. “We apply our policies consistently across the platform, regardless of speaker or political views, and we make exceptions for videos that have additional context such as countervailing views from local health authorities.”

Paul took to Twitter to criticize YouTube, referring to its employees as “leftwing cretins,” and called his suspension a “badge of honor.”

Paul’s suspension from YouTube comes a day after Twitter announced it had suspended the account of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) after she violated the platform’s rules regarding Covid-19 misinformation.

In a tweet earlier this week, Greene claimed that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “should not approve the covid vaccines” and that vaccines were “failing” and not actually curbing the spread of the virus.

A Twitter spokesperson said that the tweet “was labeled in line with our COVID-19 misleading information policy. The account will be in read-only mode for a week due to repeated violations of the Twitter Rules.”