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YouTube, TikTok Deleted ‘60 Minutes’ CECOT Clips Amid Paramount Takedown Push
The segment on the notorious torture prison—where the Trump administration has been unlawfully deporting Venezuelans—went viral on social media after being inadvertently aired in Canada.
Dec 23, 2025
Websites including YouTube and TikTok this week removed posts of a CBS News "60 Minutes" segment on a notorious prison in El Salvador, where Trump the administration has been illegally deporting Venezuelan immigrants, after being notified that publishing the clip violated parent company's copyright.
The segment on the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT)—which was intended to air on Sunday's episode of "60 Minutes"—was pulled by right-wing CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who claimed that the story "was not ready" for broadcast, despite thorough editing and clearance by key company officials.
“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices," said "60 Minutes" correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who reported the segment. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
The segment—which can still be viewed on sites including X—was shared by social media users after a Canadian network received and broadcast an original version of the "60 Minutes" episode containing the CECOT piece prior to CBS pulling the story. The social media posts containing the segment were reportedly removed after CBS parent company Paramount Skydance filed copyright claims.
A CBS News representative said that “Paramount’s content protection team is in the process of routine take down orders for the unaired and unauthorized segment.”
Weiss—who also founded and still edits the Paramount Skydance-owned Free Press—has faced criticism for other moves, including presiding over the removal of parts of a previous "60 Minutes" interview with President Donald Trump regarding potential corruption stemming from his family’s massive cryptocurrency profits.
On Tuesday, Axios reported that Weiss is planning a broad overhaul of standards and procedures at the network, where she was hired by Paramount Skydance CEO and Trump supporter David Ellison in October, despite a lack of broadcasting experience.
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YouTube Removed Hundreds of Videos of Israeli Human Rights Violations to Comply With Trump Sanctions
"YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims,” said a spokesperson for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose channel was deleted.
Nov 05, 2025
In compliance with a Trump administration effort to punish critics of Israel's genocide in Gaza, YouTube has deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian rights groups, wiping several hundred videos documenting Israeli human rights violations in the process.
According to The Intercept, the video hosting website, owned by Google, quietly removed the accounts of three groups, Al-Haq, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, in October.
These are the same three groups that the State Department hit with sanctions in September because they helped to bring evidence before the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The court would issue arrest warrants for the pair in 2024.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said explicitly that the groups were sanctioned because they "directly engaged in efforts by the International Criminal Court to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals, without Israel’s consent.”
YouTube deleted the groups' channels, as well as their entire archives, which contained over 700 videos that documented acts of brutality by the Israeli military against Palestinians.
According to The Intercept, these included an investigative report about the killing of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli troops, the military's destruction of Palestinians' homes in the West Bank, and a documentary about mothers who'd survived Israel's genocide in Gaza.
Google confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the videos to comply with the State Department sanctions.
“Google is committed to compliance with applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said in a statement.
Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said it was "outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view."
YouTube's censorship of content deemed too supportive of Palestinians predates President Donald Trump's return to power. In 2024, officials at YouTube and other social media companies were found to have cooperated through secretive back channels with a group of volunteers from Israel's tech sector to remove content critical of Israel.
Following news of the three human rights groups losing their channels, documentarian and journalist Robert Inlakesh wrote on social media that in 2024, YouTube removed his channel without warning, deleting all his content, including several documentaries he'd produced in the occupied territories.
"YouTube deleted all my coverage of Israeli soldiers shooting civilians, including children targeted on a live stream, along with my entire account," he said. "No community guidelines were violated, and three separate excuses were given to me. Then Google deleted my email and won’t respond to appeals."
Groups sanctioned by the US for supporting the ICC have previously received preliminary injunctions in two cases, in which courts said the State Department violated their First Amendment rights.
But even with the sanctions in place, Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, said there was little legal reason for YouTube to capitulate.
"It’s really hard to imagine any serious argument that sharing information from these Palestinian human rights organizations would somehow violate sanctions," she said. "Succumbing to this arbitrary designation of these Palestinian organizations, to now censor them, is disappointing and pretty surprising.”
Basel al-Sourani, an international advocacy officer and legal advisor for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that YouTube has not made it clear what policies his group's channel violated.
“YouTube said that we were not following their policy on Community Guidelines, when all our work was basically presenting factual and evidence-based reporting on the crimes committed against the Palestinian people, especially since the start of the ongoing genocide on October 7," he said.
"By doing this," he added, "YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims."
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November's Unsung Heroes: Election Workers
Poll workers and other volunteers are standing up for democracy and against disinformation. Voters need to stand with them.
Nov 04, 2024
They’ve withstood a global pandemic, power outages and even swarms of bees to help oversee one of the most accurate election processes in the world.
But nothing has presented more of a threat to millions of U.S. election workers and volunteers than the scourge of disinformation coursing across social networks in 2024. Complicating matters further is the small handful of bad actors who seem determined to transform these online lies into acts of violence at the polls and during the immediate aftermath.
These include lies about noncitizen voters that some of the most powerful online influencers are spreading, including Bad Actor Number One — X owner and far-right propagandist Elon Musk. Last week, he marked his second anniversary at the platform’s helm by continuing to boost the false claim that Democrats were transporting hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants into battleground states to skew the vote toward the party's candidates.
Again, none of this is true. “Election experts agree that noncitizens voting in federal elections is virtually nonexistent” reports Issue One, a national pro-democracy group that works to strengthen and defend the country’s election systems.
The money driving the disinformation
In its most recent report, Issue One revealed some of the dark web of secretive donors supporting the spread of such election disinformation. It’s a rogues gallery of former Trump administration officials with extensive ties to Project 2025, the far-right effort to dismantle U.S. democracy—and the system of checks and balances at its core—and replace it with an unconstitutional authoritarian regime.
Musk himself is a major source of support for the disinformation cabal. He has funneled tens of billions of dollars into efforts to remake U.S. politics in his image. In 2022, Musk spent $44 billion to take control of Twitter (now X), and has spent tens of millions more in an apparently illegal effort to pay for votes this year in Pennsylvania.
Last week, Wired’s Vittoria Elliott revealed Musk as the money (more than $100 million and counting) behind a political action committee created to compile and amplify false reports of election fraud—and use these lies to disrupt the vote count. Elliott’s reporting links Musk’s effort with the disinformation-spewing “Election Integrity Network” that Issue One exposed.
Shelter from the storm
In the eye of this tornado of lies stand the election workers themselves.
For years, members of this mostly female civic workforce have warned about threats to their safety. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice set up its Elections Threat Task Force to assess threats of violence against election workers and, when needed, prosecute those who act on these threats.
Over and again tech execs like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg demonstrate their true values when they choose not to spend more on election protection.
David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, has led efforts to safeguard U.S. election processes, paying particular attention to the election administrators and public servants who voters encounter as they cast their ballots. “The fact is somehow the hundreds of thousands of election workers and the millions of volunteers who worked on the 2020 election managed the highest turnout we had ever had in American history,” he said during a recent Free Press webinar. And they did so, Becker added, in the middle of a global pandemic.
“Their work has withstood four years of more scrutiny than any election … in world history,” he said. In that time, Becker noted, they’ve been threatened and harassed “not because they did a bad job, but because they did an outstanding job. They’re American heroes in many ways [but] as we head into this election, they're exhausted.”
Unfortunately, these heroes aren't getting any relief from the technology platforms, which have retreated from previous commitments to safeguard election integrity. And this retreat isn’t just happening at Musk’s X.
X is backsliding, but so are other platforms
In an analysis released on Nov. 1, my colleague Nora Benavidez and I found that nearly every platform has avoided dialogue and accountability around the elections. “With few exceptions, the election-integrity problem has worsened since a 2023 Free Press research report found that the largest and most widely used platforms—Meta, X, and YouTube—were backsliding on commitments they made in the wake of the 2020 elections, as ‘Big Lie’ content overwhelmed much of social media,” we wrote.
Recent reporting and research indicate a trend of declining social-media engagement on public posts that provide useful information about the voting process, including information that would debunk the sorts of lies that vilify election workers. This trend has been documented most extensively on Meta-owned platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, that have hundreds of millions of users in the United States. According to Free Press’ 2024 polling, more than half of voting-age Americans are using social-media apps to access news this election cycle. These platforms have the expertise to implement election-integrity measures. They have the resources to invest in human moderators and staffing. But over and again tech execs like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg demonstrate their true values when they choose not to spend more on election protection.
Poll workers pay the cost of this negligence. With more and more people in the United States using social networks as a source of news and information about voting, it falls on companies like Google, Meta, and TikTok to stop recycling widely disproved lies about the voting process and stand with election workers in defense of our democracy.
But don’t let the swarm of lies keep you from the polls. “What the voters of this country are experiencing is that voting for the vast majority of people is going to be convenient and easy and secure and safe,” Becker said during the Free Press webinar.
“And that’s the message I really want voters to understand … as some people might be on the fence wondering whether they should turn out or not. Turn out and vote. You’re going to have a good experience.”
Let’s hope he’s right.
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