Article goes out of its way to avoid saying what's actually in the song or video.
And Sinclair really doesn't hold a candle to Nexstar and Gray Television, who have managed to buy up the vast majority of local affiliates over the past several years.
In the early 2000s I was always astonished by how utterly misinformed Fox News viewers were. In 2021 I am always astonished by how utterly misinformed MSNBC CNN and Fox News viewers are. On certain subjects like the statistical risk of a 35-year-old healthy person getting hospitalized for covid, Fox News viewers are actually the best informed. They still overestimate the risk but not by orders of magnitude that the other two sets of viewers succumb to. My father is a rabid MSNBC and CNN viewer, and like many of your typical resistance boomers is grossly ignorant about most things happening in the world. In December he was ranting to me about how the US could have had zero covid if someone else had been president. While I agreed with him that it had been mishandled I tried to explain to him that there wasn't any countries able to keep it out except for very isolated island nations. He was completely ignorant of this. He also freaked out when I contracted covid in February before I could give vaxxed. I was trying to explain to him that I'm very fit and healthy and relatively young but he really thought I was going to have to get hospitalized. This is when I started learning about the statistics on actual hospitalizations versus what the public thought. One difference between these groups of people who watch these utterly stupid channels is that Fox News viewers are pretty aware that they watch biased news. They weren't in the early 2000s though. MSNBC and CNN viewers think they're witnessing objective reporting in general. My father is always quick to say that he reads articles from the AP as if they are objective. They are absolutely not objective anymore. Ideological capture is a thing. And it was purely ideological when the AP told their reporters to call what was obviously rioting "mostly peaceful protests". The aftermath of that absurd line of thinking was me witnessing many family members who were right of center to completely lose any and all faith in journalistic institutions. It was a watershed moment in media becoming untrusted by most of the working class.
In some populations, a person has a better chance of catching covid and dying than they do of saying they watched Chris Cuomo last night.
Note: Just curious. Didn't even know about this "Let's Go Brandon" thing until now.
The difference between lying and joking is always in context. If I dress as a police officer for Halloween it's fine, if I lead you to believe I actually am a police officer it is a crime. There's also a middle ground where someone could mistake my costume for impersonation.
I don't know what aspect of this video violated the terms of service, but I think political videos on all sides regularly make statements that aren't supported by 'mainstream' fact checking sources and therefore might fall outside the policies of services like Youtube.
If you want to argue that all speech with 'political intent' should be protected I am open to that conversation! But that is not the standard held by most services, including Youtube, which Bryson Gray agreed to when he uploaded his song.
One type of humor is known as "trolling". The basic idea is to see how much of a reaction you can get from something pointless and stupid. Now many people are making songs with the lyric "Let's go Brandon" and they are receiving hate mail, being banned, being demonitized, etc. This reaction is seen as outsized for a reference to a fairly well known piece of pop culture. Thus, to those who find outsized reactions funny, this is funny.
Ours not to reason why.
As I have said elsewhere in this thread I don't agree with the lyrics in that video. I find the video itself to be childish and silly but that would basically be 99% of rap and pop music in general.
They have not halted the spread because of vaccine misinformation like this very video which you are defending.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/
If I recall correctly, the Biden administration and the CDC both made public statements telling everyone that they would no longer need to continue wearing masks once they were vaccinated.
When US media reports on activities like this in countries like China and Russia they call it censorship. When they report on the same activities in the US they call it "protecting the public from misinformation".
It's a very very slippery slope to ban things. Who gets to choose what gets banned? Who gets to say what is misinformation or not?
It blows my mind how shortsighted most of my left of center friends are on this topic. They seem to have this delusion that these levers of power are only ever going to be controlled by the people they agree with. In the early 2000s a lot of people I argued with were totally supportive of the Patriot act. They were generally conservatives and were just completely confident it would never be used against US citizens. Now those same people are witnessing calls from people on the left who wants opposed to Patriot act to use it against US citizens with right-wing politics.