Rudy Giuliani Receives Second YouTube Strike For Election Lies, Nicotine Promotion

For the second time, YouTube has struck former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani‘s channel for perpetrating lies about the 2020 election. Accordingly, Giuliani will not be allowed to upload to his channel — including both standard videos and live streams — for two weeks.

This marks Giuliani’s second strike within a two-month period for videos falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, reports Bloomberg, which also notes that Giuliani was punished for promoting nicotine.

“We removed content from the Rudy W. Giuliani channel for violating our sale of regulated goods policy, which prohibits content facilitating the use of nicotine, and our presidential election integrity policy,” a YouTube spokeswoman told Bloomberg in a statement. “Additionally, in accordance with our long standing strikes system, we issued a strike against the Rudy W. Giuliani channel, which temporarily restricts uploading or live-streaming.”

According to YouTube’s Community Guidelines strike system, if Giuliani violates platform policies once again within a 90-day period of his first strike, his channel will be permanently terminated. Giuliani’s first strike was tendered in late January for perpetrating lies about voter fraud. At the time, YouTube also demonetized his channel.

In January, YouTube also extended its suspension of Trump’s channel indefinitely, citing ongoing concerns about its potential to incite violence in the wake of the Capitol attack.