YouTube Adds Context Warning To Searches For Tucker Carlson After Show About Jan. 6

On Monday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson tried to rewrite the historical record of President Donald Trump’s coup attempt, portraying the people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 as mostly patriotic Americans who just wanted a tour. But if you search for Tucker Carlson on the YouTube mobile app, you won’t find Carlson’s revisionist history at the top of the page. Instead, you’ll see a link to a story from CNN giving context to Carlson’s segment. And that’s angering many conservative commentators.

“Lol 1984 again,” one commenter wrote on Twitter about the move.

The note at the top of the YouTube mobile app under searches for Tucker Carlson includes a link to a CNN story titled, “What to know about the Tucker Carlson January 6 footage.” The article gives context to footage Carlson aired on Monday, including footage of the so-called QAnon Shaman, whose real name is Jacob Chansley.

Chansley, who was sentenced to 41 months in prison for felony obstruction of the Electoral College proceedings at the Capitol that day, was just a curious onlooker, according to Tucker Carlson, a man who had the freedom to walk around the building all he wanted because he wasn’t a threat to police.

The CNN article points out that many Capitol police officers were “afraid of escalating violence by engaging with the mob” after they’d violently made their way into the building and police reportedly asked him to leave.

Carlson, who exclusively received thousands of hours of security camera footage from Rep. Kevin McCarthy, opened his show on Monday by declaring that the footage he was showing had been “hidden from the public,” and tried to rewrite the story as one of protestors merely exercising their First Amendment rights.

“The protestors were angry. They believed the election they had just voted in had been unfairly conducted. They were right,” Carlson said.

But that’s a very different story from the one that Carlson has been saying in private. Recently released text messages show Carlson knew the 2020 presidential election was fair and there was no evidence of widespread fraud. In fact, Carlson tried to get a Fox reporter fired after she fact-checked the ridiculous claims being made by Sidney Powell on the network.

Conservative commentators are also upset that a “full-length clip of Tucker’s Show” was deleted, though that’s unlikely coming from anyone who opposed Tucker Carlson’s version of history. Full-length episodes of cable TV shows are regularly deleted from YouTube on copyright grounds, with companies like Fox News filing complaints to have them pulled. A full version of the episode can easily be found on competing video-sharing site Rumble, which is much slower to respond to copyright takedown notices.

A YouTube segment from last night’s show about the QAnon Shaman is still up at YouTube and has been viewed over 1.4 million times at the time of this writing.

It’s not immediately clear why the warning only appears on YouTube’s mobile app and YouTube did not immediately respond to questions emailed Tuesday morning. I’ll update this post if I hear back.