Not really, at the time the science suggested that was the best path. Youtube is a private enterprise and has every right to remove material that they consider dangerous based on their research teams. You were perfectly free to make a video and release it on you own website or peertube or via torrents/usenet. You have a free voice but you don't have the right to mass distribution, that is up to you (the hypothetical generic "you") to see that it happens.
> at the time the science suggested that was the best path.
Science is not a monolith. I can find a hundred distinguished scientists who disagree with that statement.
... that is an especially controversial statement for anyone who remembers how (1) SARS was airborne and (2) masks did help, contrary to the public position of the WHO/CDC.
This cognitive bias is something that is really ingrained in the population by pop-sci media, usually ones that start with "Scientists now say that ____". Technically it's correct that "(some) scientists say that ____" but laypersons can easily misunderstand that "(all) scientists say that ____".
Yes, legally YouTube is in the right.
Morally, society needs to solve the problem of the private platforms that are quasi-utility services.
Can you imagine when/if your power company, water distributor decides to cut you off because you disagree with the official record?
As far as I understand, at that time the science did not suggest that this was the best path - at the time the science was inconclusive with reasonable support for both aerosol and droplet options; and the blocked videos had just as much, just as good scientific basis as the official position. They were blocked purely because of the WHO political decision to promote one option over the other, and that WHO decision did not have a proper scientific backing - and when that was challenged in public, the response was to block the scientific arguments which were valid and reasonable already at the time, and some time later turned out to be conclusive.
Furthermore, there was a long gap of many, many months between a scientific consensus that the WHO position was literally wrong and the changing of that position - and during that gap any blocking of these videos was not only without a scientific basis but even directly going against what science suggests.
Not activists and not entirely black, but I know that Youtube works with the Metropolitan Police in the UK to remove drill rap videos that the Met considers too violent (violent content, of course, being one of the things that is against Youtube's TOS).
(As always, content removal is a controversial topic, and that includes this topic.)
Youtube has been stung by various "scandals" in the past where advertisers temporarily "boycott" (or, at least, raised a ruckus) when an ad appears next to content the advertisers consider objectionable (such as, as I recall, child exploitation content and al-Qaeda / jihadist groups several years ago). As an ad supported platform, I do think that Youtube certainly should have the right to monitor their platform in order to remove content that they believe is bad for business, including protecting advertiser brands from content they don't want to appear next to. Youtube also has legal requirements to follow (eg copyright law) and may do some things more to manage their own brand, or even perhaps manage legal liability. It would be nice if Youtube was more transparent about the whys of their content management, but as a private company they are not obligated to do so.
Youtube is not the last word in streaming videos. There are several platforms dedicated to hosting videos that would fall afoul of Youtube's content policy. Many of the ones I can think of are not funded by advertising, though some platforms are big enough where "niche advertising networks" are possible (eg big adult video networks like Pornhub).
