ouTube has deleted commentator Lauren Southern’s much-anticipated documentary Borderless less than 24 hours after it was uploaded to the platform.
Before it was removed, Southern reported several difficulties in trying to make Borderless available.
“On release day the film wouldn’t play in the back end—so we uploaded another version. This version uploaded and processed, we could watch it and we set it to premiere. Suddenly the movie began to process again and stopped in time for the premiere,” Southern said.
“So when the time set for the premiere rolled around we waited and—nothing. Thirty minutes of ‘premiere starting shortly’ we hit publish. The film went live but wouldn’t show up on the channel, nor would it show up in people’s subscription area.”
“There were no notifications and when shared or added to lists the video would simply say ‘video deleted’. Video also has been stuck continually on 1 view and only available by searching ‘Borderless’ specifically or using the direct link,” she added.
YouTube hasn’t yet explained how exactly Borderless violates its terms of service.
The documentary follows Southern and her team into their investigation of Europe’s migrant crisis, covering human traffickers and illicit NGO activity used to exploit Europe’s open borders.
“[Borderless is] a completely fair, reasonable and balanced movie highlighting human trafficking and people smuggling on the ground in 9 countries. 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,” Southern said.
This latest censorship move by YouTube shows that even measured and thorough investigative journalism isn’t safe from Big Tech’s fascist social engineers.
A backup version of Borderless is available below: