YouTube has removed Lauren Southern’s conservative documentary Borderless from their platform. The film was deleted less than 24 hours after Southern made it available to the public on her personal YouTube channel.
Initially, Southern's team encountered numerous problems in trying to publish the documentary on YouTube. As Southern explains:
“We uploaded the documentary a day before the release, with no issues,” Southern and the Borderless team told Human Events.
“On release day the film wouldn’t play in the back end—so we uploaded another version. This version uploaded and processed, we could watch it and we set it to premiere. Suddenly the movie began to process again and stopped in time for the premiere.”
“So when the time set for the premiere rolled around we waited and—nothing. Thirty minutes of ‘premiere starting shortly’ we hit publish. The film went live but wouldn’t show up on the channel, nor would it show up in people’s subscription area. There were no notifications and when shared or added to lists the video would simply say ‘video deleted’. Video also has been stuck continually on 1 view and only available by searching 'Borderless' specifically or using the direct link.”
In short, most of Lauren Southern’s 700,000 subscribers were not notified of the video’s release, as it didn’t appear in timelines or liked videos. It has since been completely removed from YouTube and is now unavailable to watch.
[caption id="attachment_177170" align="aligncenter" width="858"]
Screenshot of Borderless on YouTube[/caption]
Borderless follows Southern and her team in their investigation of European migrant crisis. The documentary features interviews with human traffickers in Morocco; and secret recordings of ostensibly illicit NGO activity in Greece, uncovering large scale operations by NGOs to facilitate mass migration into Europe.
“Borderless, a documentary covering the migrant crisis in Europe from the perspective of arriving migrants has been wiped from YouTube within 24 hours,” Southern told Human Events.
“[Borderless is] a completely fair, reasonable and balanced movie highlighting human trafficking and people smuggling on the ground in 9 countries. It could be argued this is the most comprehensive documentary ever produced on the issue. No 'hate speech', no opinions, just raw footage from on the ground. And it was taken down,” Southern said.
In the months prior to its publication, BuzzFeed News dubbed Southern a “far-right YouTuber,” condemning her for secretly recording NGO workers, with claims that the documentary has “huge implications for the safety and security of both the refugees … and volunteers working there.” The documentarian’s efforts exposed NGOs for teaching migrants how to trick “fucking stupid” European Union border guards, Breitbart reported.
“We teach them … how to keep their private trauma private because all this acting is a shield. I tell them this is acting, all of this is acting, it’s all acting as though this is theatre,” said Ariel Ricker, executive director of pro-migrant NGO Advocates Abroad in one of the secret recordings. “So for them to get through they must act their part in the theatre, and that is the refugee in trauma because these EASO officers are so f***ing stupid, all they know is written on the paper.”
Ian Miles Cheong is the managing editor of Human Events
