This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.
Dennis Prager, founder of the right-wing propaganda outlet Prager University, has a First Amendment right to lie about climate change, deny that straight people get HIV, viciously vilify Muslims, and declare that “men get turned on by any sight of female flesh.” He does not, however, have a right to upload these claims to YouTube and make money off them, the 9 th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday.
PragerU may not be a household name, but it has a surprisingly broad reach: Its five-minute videos have racked up well over 2 billion views across platforms. Although these videos are presented as unbiased educational lessons, they promote exclusively conservative, often fringe views. Prager and his friends regularly condemn Muslims, LGBTQ equality, abortion, feminism, gun control, and campaign finance reform, and deny climate change. (The company is partly funded by fracking billionaires.) The outlet has mastered the art of grabbing viewers’ attention with a provocative video, presented as fact, then pulling them deeper down the rabbit hole into Prager’s bizarre world of toxic propaganda.
It is strange, and more than a little pathetic, that the 9 th Circuit had to remind PragerU that YouTube is incapable of unconstitutionally censoring its videos. The Constitution prohibits Congress or the states from abridging the freedom of speech; as the Supreme Court reiterated last year, the First Amendment simply does not apply to private entities, even if they create an open forum for varying viewpoints. Yet PragerU has spent more than two years hounding YouTube in court. Its lawyers insist that PragerU has a constitutional right to host its videos on the platform and profit from them.
AdvertisementThis dispute revolves around a number of PragerU videos that YouTube either restricted (limiting them to adult viewer) or demonetized (removing third-party ads). Restricted or demonetized videos include “Is Islam a Religion of Peace?” (answer: it isn’t), “What’s Holding the Arab World Back?” (answer, courtesy of Bret Stephens, summarizing his column in the Wall Street Journal: “the disease of the Arab mind”), and “The World’s Most Persecuted Minority: Christians” (self-explanatory).* PragerU argued that, because YouTube performs a “traditionally public function by regulating free speech within a public forum,” it has transformed into a “state actor.” As a result, it cannot regulate videos on the basis of content or viewpoint, as it apparently did here.
