@HighImpactFlix — 618 Flagged COVID-Denial and Vaccine-Injury Videos, Zero Removals

@HighImpactFlix opened its Odysee channel on 30 November 2020, the same month YouTube was finalising its third wave of COVID-19 misinformation removals. Five and a half years later the channel holds 2,005 total claims, of which our scanner's 218-keyword violation index flags 618 — a 29.9% flagged share, which is roughly one in every three uploads and an order of magnitude above the platform mean. Across those 618 items the accumulated tip activity is 81,560 LBC. Nothing on the channel has been actioned by Odysee in five and a half years.

The content lives in two related genres that mainstream platforms removed in 2020-2021: (a) vaccine injury footage, including hidden-camera segments framed as evidence that COVID vaccines cause "immediate adverse reactions", and (b) COVID-denial / lockdown grievance material framed as citizen journalism. The titles do the work themselves:

The Top Fifteen Stakes (Verbatim)

Every one of the top fifteen is a video the major mainstream platforms either removed or de-monetised between 2020 and 2022. YouTube's COVID-19 medical misinformation policy (introduced March 2020, expanded September 2021) explicitly covers content that "contradicts local health authorities on the cause, transmission, or treatment of COVID-19" and "Promotes false claims of harm from vaccines as proof of a cover-up" — exactly the editorial line of the top item on this list. Facebook (now Meta) had a parallel policy from December 2020. TikTok's policy from late 2020. Even Rumble, the "free speech" YouTube alternative, removed the "Self-Spreading Vaccines are REAL" genre in mid- 2022 after pharmacist trade-body complaints. Odysee has never removed any of it.

The Adverse-Reaction Footage Sub-Genre

Five of the top fifteen items above are variants of the same format: a clip framed as showing a vaccinated person suffering an immediate physical reaction (seizure, fainting, collapse). The format is well-documented in the public-health-disinformation literature. The University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public catalogued it in their Repeat Spreaders and Election Delegitimization brief (2022); the European Digital Media Observatory tracked it as a cross-platform misinformation pattern in their 2023 disinformation register. The unifying feature: the footage is almost always real (people do have vasovagal reactions to needles; faintings happen), but the narration ascribes the reaction to the vaccine itself rather than the standard physiological response to being injected with anything. The clips are surgical: they show the collapse, they omit the recovery, they omit the subsequent medical assessment.

The same content was a primary subject of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate's "Disinformation Dozen" report (March 2021) — which named twelve accounts responsible for 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation across the major platforms. @HighImpactFlix wasn't on the original Dozen list, but the format he/she/they use is the same format those twelve accounts used, and the migration path from Facebook/YouTube/Instagram to Odysee post-2021 is the documented secondary residence for that content. The Disinformation Dozen list itself prompted those mainstream platforms to remove or label the named accounts. Odysee's response to the same content has been to host it for 1,988 days and counting.

Why This Channel and Not the Others

We've documented several individual COVID-denial channels previously — see The Medical Misinformation Machine on a single 38-video channel that collected 97,730 LBC, and the French COVID-Denial Network on the five-channel ARCOM-jurisdiction cluster. @HighImpactFlix is materially different in two ways:

• Scale: 618 flagged items is 16x the previous medical-misinformation deep-dive channel and 2x the French-network total combined. The channel is, by item count, one of the single largest concentrated sources of COVID-misinformation content on the platform.
• Flagged share: 29.9% of all content on the channel matches a violation keyword. For comparison, mainstream channels typically register under 1% on the same scan, and even Alex Jones's @AlexJonesChannel registers at ~3% flagged share by claim count. A 29.9% rate means a third of every visitor's session on this channel is statistically likely to land on a flagged item.

The Public-Health Liability

The clinical literature on what this content does to childhood and adult vaccination rates is unambiguous. Vaccine-hesitancy messaging that frames adverse reactions as government cover-up measurably reduces MMR uptake (multiple peer-reviewed studies 2017-2024), measurably reduces seasonal influenza vaccination (CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 2023), and measurably increases the probability of childhood vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) explicitly named platform non-removal of this content category as a contributing factor in the 2024 European measles resurgence. The harm is not speculative.

Odysee's defence — the standard we-are-decentralised-cannot-moderate position summarised in our Four Employees, Zero Moderation piece — does not survive contact with the data. A platform cannot simultaneously claim it has no moderation capacity AND collect a 5% platform fee on the resulting tip flow. 5% of 81,560 LBC is ~4,078 LBC in platform fees on the @HighImpactFlix tip rail alone — money that, if Odysee's policy claims were sincere, the platform would refuse to collect on content it has "no capacity to review".

What Should Happen

The minimum viable response from Odysee would be to (a) apply its own published Community Guidelines — which prohibit "false or misleading information that may cause serious harm to a person's health" — and remove or label the top fifteen items above; (b) publish an Article 17 statement of reasons for each action; and (c) include the channel-level flagged-share metric in the never-filed DSA Article 15 transparency report. None of these steps require a new headcount or a new policy.

The minimum viable response from EU regulators is an Article 16 notice escalation to Coimisiún na Meán under the cross-border DSA mechanism. The constructive-knowledge threshold is easily met: the content has been live and unactioned for 1,988 days; the platform's own Community Guidelines prohibit the content category; the flagged-share metric is published on this very page.

We have served Article 16 notices on the top 15 items above to Odysee's support address, with CC to Coimisiún na Meán and (for the EU-language equivalents found in the broader 618-item set) ARCOM and BNetzA. Status checks at +30/+60/+90 days land on the takedown-tests register. The 618 specific URLs and the channel-metadata snapshot refresh from /data/flagged.json on every deploy.