Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications and Cyber Security) Share this | Hansard source

Labor recently wrote to YouTube highlighting a number of videos posted by the member for Hughes that violated its COVID-19 misinformation policy. Responding to this letter, Google agreed that these videos violated its misinformation policy and removed them, but strangely, of the seven other videos on the member for Hughes's channel that we reported directly on the YouTube platform at the same time, only one has been removed.

During the last federal election the UAP spent more than $8 million on YouTube ads, and the UAP has spent more than $1 million on YouTube ads in the last month. It has spent up to $100,000 promoting a new video citing incomplete extracts of a Therapeutic Goods Administration adverse event report on COVID-19 vaccinations that the TGA has previously said could be 'seriously misleading'. That video has been viewed more than 1.3 million times in the last three weeks, but it still hasn't been taken down. All these UAP ads are authorised and voiced by the member for Hughes.

YouTube has a three-strikes policy governing the banning of individuals on its platform for policy violations. The member for Hughes told the House that he has previously received at least one strike from YouTube for posting COVID-19 misinformation. He has had further videos removed in response to Labor's letter. The question is: why is the member for Hughes and the UAP's YouTube page still operating after repeatedly violating YouTube's policies, let alone spending millions of dollars promoting medical misinformation during a pandemic? Given the member for Hughes's record of spreading misinformation and his intent to match the 2019 election spend of the UAP, the potential for harm is obvious and Google must act in a transparent and proactive way. (Time expired)

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