YouTube Banishes Alternative for Sweden

The dissident party Alternative for Sweden (AfS) came into prominence early this year. It owes its recent rise in part to the dissatisfaction felt by some supporters of the anti-immigration party Sweden Democrats, which was perceived to be taking an insufficiently strong stance against mass migration and Islamization. The more popular the AfS has become, the more vigorously the Powers That Be have worked to suppress it. The most recent action against it was the closure of its YouTube channel.

Many thanks to K. from Germany for translating this article from the Swedish dissident website Fria Tider:

AFS: YouTube Has Permanently Deleted Us

23 July 2018

YouTube has permanently deleted the channel of the Alternativ för Sverige [Alternative for Sweden, AFS], the party confirmed on Monday. The party is accused by YouTube of “agitation against a population group” [hets mot folkgrupp] because they uploaded a clip about a SVT news anchor who speaks broken Swedish.

The nationalist party Alternative for Sweden was informed today that YouTube on Monday morning has permanently deleted the party’s official channel on the service.

The reason given was a video clip the party had linked to regarding a news anchor for SVT who spoke Swedish badly.

Under the video clip the party had published the text: “News anchors should be able to speak FLUENT SWEDISH!” This appeal is seen by YouTube as constituting “agitation against a population group” and violating the video service’s so-called “community guidelines”, writes the party in a press release.

According to AFS, the channel had hundreds of thousands of visitors and was the second largest among those belonging to Swedish political parties, measured by the number of subscribers.

The channel’s homepage now only reads “This account has been terminated for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”

“The Alternative for Sweden is on its way into parliament, and the politically correct establishment does everything in its power to throw a monkey wrench in our path. The ‘agitation against a population group’ legislation concerns thought crime, and is employed by the establishment to silence opposition and limit freedom of expression. That it counts as agitation against a population group to think that news anchors in Sweden should be able to speak fluent Swedish shows what a joke of a law this is. The ‘agitation against a population group’ legislation needs to be ripped up immediately,” says party leader Gustav Kasselstrand.

“We have been subject to censorship on YouTube and other social media time and again. That foreign private companies with a monopoly have the ability to dictate which opinions and which political parties are able to reach out to the general public is one of the greatest threats to the freedom of expression today. The Alternative for Sweden is the only party that wants to forbid political censorship in social media.”

YouTube’s attack on the AFS comes after an intense campaign of censorship and agitation by the Bonnier group’s newspapers during the spring, which among other things got the government to threaten Google and YouTube with stricter laws if they would not take down “hate” within 24 hours. YouTube gave in and informed so-called volunteer organizations that it would now chase after “net hate” on their platform.

YOUTUBE HAS DELETED ALTERNATIVE FOR SWEDEN’S CHANNEL!

After we uploaded a clip named: “News anchors should be able to speak FLUENT SWEDISH!”, @YouTube chooses to permanently delete our channel.

RETWEET this picture if you want to STOP censorship in social media! #AfS2018 #svpol pic.twitter.com/pO4ipTncy4

— Alternative for Sweden (@AfS_riks) 23 July 2018

4 thoughts on “YouTube Banishes Alternative for Sweden

  1. Freedom is not the absence of government. Freedom is protected by the government. Those libertarians who claim all government is bad, ignore the fact that with no protective government, it would take about a day for some coherent government to co-opt any unprotected region.

    The framers of the Constitution attempted to institute a series of checks and balances to give the US a government strong enough to protect the continent and prevent armed conflict among states, but not so strong as to threaten individual liberty. I think the weakest link in this was the Supreme Court, which finds it easiest to co-opt power and whose limits are not sufficiently constrained in the Constitution.

    Having said this, the gravest threat imaginable to liberty is the existence of a vested, unaccountable government bureaucracy in collusion with state-supported, state-shielded duopoly companies , both focused on suppressing speech through both legal and extra-legal processes.

  2. the gravest threat imaginable to liberty is the existence of a vested, unaccountable government bureaucracy in collusion with state-supported, state-shielded duopoly companies…

    We’re getting there fast with GoogTubeFaceAxe. They can’t do that stuff in China; the Chinese call the tune and they dance to it.

    I don’t know how to mount a concerted effort against any of them, but maybe GoogToob will watch what happens to FaceBook as it flounders. Or maybe not. The hubris is pretty out-sized. They make Trump look like a shrinking violet.

    • They must be broken up under the antitrust laws as the giant trusts like Rockefeller’s were busted a hundred years ago by Theodore Roosevelt. What is Trump waiting for? And his gutless Attorney General?

  3. The biggest problem with these huge multinational cyber corporations is, that most people do not realize the huge power they have and the grave danger that lies therein.
    It was easier for a citizen of Nazi Germany, the Stalinist USSR or Maoist China to realize the evils of the ruling power, and their visible cruelty made it harder for them to brainwash the total population.
    The oppressive powers of today have become (apparently) “soft”and quasi-accommodating to the general public, and hardly any one realizes the dangers they face.
    To illustrate the change in recent history: Eisenhower still identified the military-industrial complex as the biggest threat to freedom, for Kennedy this became the CIA, for both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan these were the IMF and the Federal Reserve, and for Donald Trump the biggest threat is…Google, Youtube and Fakebook.

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