Rabidly pro-Trump 'news' network OAN goes silent on Facebook and YouTube

One America News Network (OANN), a far-right conservative media outlet, has not posted any videos to its Facebook or YouTube accounts in over a month.

The social media blackout by OANN, which has been closely affiliated with Donald Trump and has for years been a leading source of pro-Trump conspiracy theories and disinformation, has come since President Joe Biden was sworn into office and as he has gone about seating his Cabinet and undoing many of Trump’s policies.

The last time a video was posted to the OANN YouTube account was Jan. 9. The most recent video posted to Facebook by OANN was uploaded on Jan. 8. The network has a large following on both of those platforms, with 1.5 million followers on Facebook and 1.4 million YouTube subscribers.

OANN has also noticeably slowed down the number of videos posted to its Twitter account. It last posted a video on Twitter on Feb. 11.

The network has scrubbed its website of links to its social media accounts. An archive of the OANN website captured on Feb. 8 shows links to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter; those were gone by the next day. As of Feb. 15, the links were still absent.

OANN has continued to post videos on the conservative Canadian video platform Rumble, but while OANN’s YouTube videos often had tens of thousands of views, its most recent Rumble videos have only slightly more than a thousand views.

OANN also still publishes videos on its own website.

OANN’s retreat from the most popular social media services comes as the network has been under fire for airing election falsehoods.

OANN was among the most prominent outlets, along with Fox News and Newsmax TV, that promoted claims that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud in favor of President Joe Biden.

OANN promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems manipulated voting results in Biden’s favor. In response, Dominion sent warnings to OANN about its content. While OANN publicly defended its broadcasts, it also quietly removed pages on its website containing falsehoods about Dominion.

Dominion has sued Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell for billions of dollars in damages in response to their lies about the election. It has not sued OANN at this point.

The network has continued to run stories claiming conspiracies were involved in stealing the election from Trump.

It recently aired a “documentary” created by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell that made allegations about numerous election-related conspiracies. In January, Lindell was photographed after meeting with Trump holding a document that appeared to advocate the use of martial law before Biden was sworn in.

In November, OANN was blocked for one week from posting to YouTube after it uploaded a video containing false claims about the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We removed a video from OANNN and issued a strike on the channel for violating our COVID-19 misinformation policy, which prohibits content claiming there’s a guaranteed cure,” YouTube said in a statement.

OANN did not respond to a request for comment from the American Independent Foundation.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.