Alphabet‘s CEO Sundar Pichai strikes again. Alphabet wholly owns Google (of which Pichai also is CEO), and Google wholly owns YouTube.

Pichai has just engaged—again—in political censorship:

Social media giant YouTube took down an interview of Democrat presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, Jr, claiming that chemicals in the water are turning kids transgender.

What makes this especially insidious is that Kennedy is a political candidate for the Progressive-Democratic Party’s nomination for President. Pichai is actively putting his thumb on the scale in an American election by censoring one of the candidates. His excuse for this, through his carefully anonymous Google spokesperson, is this:

YouTube “removed a video from the Jordan Peterson channel for violating YouTube‘s general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities.”

Therein lies an additional act of censorship: no one is allowed to question vaccines (which is not what Kennedy was talking about with his allegations of those chemicals, anyway); the science is settled, Damn it!

Pichai objects to open debate and to the correction of false, mis-, or erroneous information by the provision of other information via free discussion and debate. His behavior provides yet another reason to heavily modify, or remove entirely, social media’s Section 230 protections. Social media has gotten too big, become too central to our nation’s public square, to be allowed to continue to abuse that protection.