Rand Paul reverses on social media liability protections after YouTube refused to remove ‘false’ vid

Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul is reversing his stance on social media liability protections after YouTube refused to take down a “false” and “defamatory” video about him.”Youtube and its parent company Google deserve to be sued,” Paul wrote in an op-ed published Monday in The New York Post. 
The libertarian-minded Paul also said the video “falsely” accuses him of taking money from Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and was on the platform for three weeks, before the poster removed it. 
“Despite the video leading to death threats, YouTube “refused to remove the video,” he said.
The senator also argued that he has “long defended the private-property rights of internet companies and long defended them against overzealous, partisan abuses of antitrust law, even when I was angry with YouTube for its policies that silenced my attempts to educate the public on the potentially deadly consequences of relying on cloth masks to prevent transmission of COVID-19.”
However, Paul said that he changed his mind because of the death threats he received over the video.
“I have always accepted, perhaps too uncritically, that unmitigated liability protection for social-media sites was necessary to defend the principle of free speech,” he wrote. “Until now, I had not sufficiently considered the effects of internet providers hosting content accusing people of committing crimes.”
Paul said that when he “formally notified Google that this video is unsupported by facts, defames me, harasses me and now endangers my life,” the company “responded that they don’t investigate the truth of accusations … and refused to take down the video.”
He said the person who posted the video removed it “under threat of legal penalty. Yet, the defamatory video still has a life of its own, circulated widely on the internet and the damage done is difficult to reverse.”

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