“If you put up this whole interview,” Donald Trump said during a podcast livestream on Wednesday afternoon, “let’s see what happens when Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and all of them take it down.”

Trump named the wrong platforms; the podcast, Full Send, a mildly Rogan-esque bro-fest, was streaming on YouTube. But otherwise his prediction made sense, because during the interview he reiterated his claim that he, not Joe Biden, was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. “The election fraud was massive,” he said during one of several riffs on the theme. “I call it ‘the crime of the century.’ We’re doing a book on it.”

YouTube has a strict policy against claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Yet the video stayed up for more than 24 hours, drawing more than 5 million views. YouTube took it down Thursday evening, a few hours after WIRED inquired about it. It's the latest example of how platforms can struggle to enforce strict misinformation policies—and it raises the question of whether this kind of content ban makes sense in the first place.

Last week, YouTube suspended the Hill, a political publication in Washington, DC, for seven days after its YouTube channel aired clips of Trump claiming election fraud. One came from his recent speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The second was a snippet from a Trump interview on Fox News, which was broadcast on the Hill’s daily commentary show, Rising.

The latter clip wasn’t even primarily about the...

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