ABBY MARTIN : DEPLATFORMED BY YOUTUBE

For three years Abby Martin produced Breaking The Set on RT America. The show was also screened throughout the world, including RT in New Zealand. As the war in Ukraine continues, YouTube has been busy removing anything associated with Russian state media and Breaking The Set has been one of the casualties. All 550 episodes have now been deemed unsuitable for viewing on YouTube.This is Abby's response.

HEY EMPIRE BABIES, you may have heard that RT America shut down and anything affiliated with Russian state media removed by social media corporations. This includes the back catalog of Breaking the Set, a show I hosted for three years at RT America from 2012-2014. YouTube just banned all 550 episodes in the US and across Europe. 

In a 2017 report about RT, the US Director of National Intelligence said that Breaking The Set “promoted radical discontent” for covering things like socialism and third parties. The government campaign to censor forbidden viewpoints started then, when alternative media was algorithmically back-paged in a crusade against "Fake News" and it won’t stop until all of us are removed from these platforms. This years-long crack down culminated in tech giants purging thousands of my critical interviews and reports about US empire. 

Knowing this was coming still doesn’t prepare you for the loss. Years of my blood sweat and tears went into producing and sharing this show to get the information to as many people as possible. The channel hosted a community and was the primary vehicle for sharing the content, with a time capsule of comments and embeds in countless articles that are now dead. A chunk of the historical record was removed in the blink of an eye. This is the modern equivalent to book burning.

It looks like I am able to get access to the full episodes and will be announcing an archive soon, so stay tuned for that. We are in a dangerous moment as the war fervor intensifies, that anything deemed affiliated with "enemy" media can be removed, which includes Empire Files. Thank you for supporting us through such dire times, when independently produced journalism is most needed. You all make this work possible.