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AUBURN, Alabama, March 9, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – Conservative media outlet Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) had its channel suspended by YouTube for two weeks after it broadcast former President Donald Trump’s February 28 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Florida.

RSBN announced that they will not be able to broadcast livestreams or upload any video content to their YouTube channel, which boasts 1.5 million subscribers, throughout the suspension and that the offending video, Trump’s speech, has been removed, though it had garnered four million views before that point. RSBN noted that the suspension was awarded because of a violation of YouTube’s policy on “election misinformation,” a topic that was only briefly commented on by the former president.

Before the suspension, RSBN posted a tweet describing their intent to keep Trump’s speech on their channel, despite knowing that YouTube have been enforcing a policy against free speech. “We try to play by the rules, but we will not censor President Trump,” the tweet reads, adding that “if it (the video) gets removed, we didn’t do it.”

RSBN’s announcement added, “Any further violations may result in the permanent suspension of our YouTube channel, which has amassed over 1.5 million subscribers.” “We told you all that we had to be careful, and this is why. It’s a new world.”

In a separate statement, the broadcaster wrote that supplying “countervailing viewpoints” to Trump’s notes on the election would have been a way of maintaining an active channel on YouTube’s service, but that “(e)ssentially we would have had to go on air and say everything Trump just said about election fraud is not true.”

“Even if we believed that,” they said, “we wouldn’t sell out like that and say it just to keep a video up. We try to follow the rules. Don’t air certain things that we normally would — but we won’t censor President Trump or push back against things he says that, quite frankly, we agree with.”

RSBN stated that it prides itself on providing “very little in the way of commentary” when presenting news pieces, preferring to “just turn a camera on and show you what’s happening — and let you decide. People can choose to watch it, not watch it, hate it or love it. That’s called freedom. If that’s no longer allowed, then God help us.”

In what would become a prophetic statement against the censoring of his CPAC speech, Trump himself noted that “(a)ll of the election integrity measures in the world will mean nothing if we don’t have free speech. If Republicans can be censored for speaking the truth and calling out corruption, we will not have democracy and we will only have left-wing tyranny.”

He added that the “time has come to break up Big Tech monopolies and restore fair competition.”

YouTube has embarked on something of a suspension spree recently, banning the channel of former Trump legal counsel Rudy Giuliani as well as removing a Newsmax video and a video of an attorney testifying to the Ohio legislature about spreading “COVID-19 misinformation,” according to a report by The Epoch Times.

Giuliani’s channel was axed for the second time after allegedly violating the tech giant’s terms regarding nicotine and the 2020 presidential election: “We removed content from the Rudy W. Giuliani channel for violating our sale of regulated goods policy, which prohibits content facilitating the use of nicotine, and our presidential election integrity policy,” a spokesperson for YouTube said.

LifeSiteNews has also felt the cold hammer of Big Tech censorship fall, with YouTube permanently removing our channel from its platform in February, along with access to all of our videos, amounting to tens of thousands of hours, and leaving more than 300,000 subscribers in the lurch. YouTube’s censorship of LifeSite's coverage ramped over the  2020 election, COVID-19 and the vaccine, but no official reason was given for the permanent ban.

Facebook too is stepping up its suppression of news content, removing a LifeSiteNews post that warned about the health risks of the experimental COVID vaccines for pregnant women, making a total of eight LifeSite posts that Facebook has flagged or completely removed in the last month.