A slew of major far-right video personalities just lost their online home.
On Monday, YouTube banned a half dozen white nationalist channels from its platform for continually violating its policies. The accounts belonged to a range of far-right groups and personalities.
“We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies,” said a YouTube spokesperson. “After updating our guidelines to better address supremacist content, we saw a 5x spike in video removals and have terminated over 25,000 channels for violating our hate speech policies.”
According to YouTube, the six channels that were removed repeatedly violated its policies by uploading hate-filled content targeting people of protected groups. In addition, these channels used their accounts to link to hateful content off the video platform, which is also against YouTube policy.
The biggest channel hit with a ban today belonged to Stefan Molyneux. The Canadian white nationalist had been on the platform for more than a decade, amassing nearly one million subscribers. Earlier this year, YouTube had demonetized Molyneux’s channel for violating its hate and harassment policies.
The now-former YouTuber started his channel as a libertarian commentator but had increasingly shifted into more toxic communities, such as the men’s rights movement. In recent years, he more openly espoused his white supremacist ideologies. Molyneux has even been accused of running a cult by family and friends of his fanbase.
YouTube also banned the channel belonging to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Duke has long been one of the most recognizable faces in the white supremacist movement, having even run for U.S. Congress.
Richard Spencer, who coined the term alt-right and starred in one of 2017’s most viral videos when a protester punched him in the face at Trump’s inauguration, saw his channel banned as well on Monday. The “Radix” YouTube channel for Spencer’s National Policy Institute organization was also removed from the platform.
American Renaissance, a “think tank” founded by white nationalist Jared Taylor, and its AmRenPodcasts channels, were both banned as well.
YouTube updated its hate speech policies to limit white supremacist content just over a year ago. The updated rules prohibited videos “alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.” These policies immediately banned content, such as videos denying that the Holocaust occurred, from the platform.
Millions of comments, hundreds of thousands of videos, and thousands of channels have been removed from YouTube as a result of the company’s bans of hate speech and white supremacist content.
These YouTube bans come on the same day Reddit banned thousands of subreddit groups, including the r/The_Donald, for violating its new hate speech policy. Twitch also temporarily suspended Donald Trump’s official channel today for breaking its “hateful conduct” rules.
The actions taken against hate speech across multiple separate social media platforms was reminiscent of when right wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was deplatformed in the summer of 2018. Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and a host of other tech companies banned Jones and his Infowars accounts from their respective services for consistently violating hate-speech rules.
Interestingly, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitch all took action against hateful content during the same week Facebook is facing a mass advertiser boycott over hate speech on its platform.