Quebec court launches class action lawsuit against YouTube's COVID-related content censorship

A class action lawsuit against YouTube’s censorship of COVID-era speech on the platform has been allowed to proceed in Canada.

The primary plaintiff in the case, which has now been greenlit by the Quebec Superior Court, is YouTuber Éloïse Boies, with the case accusing Google’s video platform of censoring information about vaccines, the pandemic, and the virus itself.

Boies, who runs the channel “Élo Wants to Know,” states in the lawsuit that three of her videos were removed by YouTube (one of the censored videos was about… censorship) for allegedly violating the site’s policies around medical misinformation and contradicting the World Health Organization’s and local health authorities’ COVID narratives of the time.

However, the content creator claims that the decisions represented an unlawful and deliberate suppression of free speech. In February, Boies revealed that in addition to having her videos deleted, the censors also labeled her an “anti-vaxxer” and a “conspiracy theorist,” causing her to lose contracts.

The filing cites the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms as the document YouTube violated, while the class action status of the lawsuit stems from it, including any individual or legal entity in Quebec whose videos about COVID were censored or who were prevented from viewing such videos from mid-March 2020 onwards.

Google, on the other hand, argues that it is not obligated to respect the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms and therefore cannot be held liable for decisions to censor content that it does not approve of – or, as the giant put it, to give space to videos “regardless of their content.”

But in announcing his decision, Supreme Court Justice Lukasz Granosik noted that freedom of expression “does not only mean freedom of expression, but also freedom of publication and freedom of creation.”

The judge emphasized the importance that the Supreme Court of Canada attaches to guaranteed freedom of expression as an essential building block of a democratic society, concluding that “If (Google) engages in censorship by preventing certain people from posting videos and preventing other people from viewing those same videos, it thereby impedes the free circulation of ideas and exposes itself to having to defend its ways of doing things.”

Google was ordered to stop censoring content because it conflicts with health authorities, the WHO, or governments, pay $1,000 in compensatory and $1,000 in punitive damages to each of the plaintiffs in the case, as well as “additional compensation provided by law since the filing of the application for permission to institute class action proceedings pursuant to the court’s decision.”

As for those who were prevented from accessing content, the decision on compensation will be the subject of a future hearing.