YouTube reportedly banned popular far-right users such as David Duke and Richard Spencer on Tuesday after saying the users violated policies.
Richard Spencer and David Duke are bigger names, but YouTube banning Stefan Molyneux is a big, big deal. He had 300 million lifetime views (!), and was the first step down the alt-right rabbit hole for a lot of young men, including Caleb Cain. https://t.co/7UojMUuwWR
— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) June 29, 2020
“We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies,” a YouTube representative said to The Guardian. YouTube updated its policy guidelines June 5. (RELATED: Oklahoma Man Shoots Woman For Trying To Steal His Nazi Flag)
The guidelines focus on videos that suggest the supremacy of one group over others and attempt to reduce the amount of misinformation on the platform.
“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,” the spokesperson told The Guardian.
The company is saying that Duke, Spencer and blogger Stefan Molyneux were banned due to their violation of the supremacy policy, per The Guardian. YouTube also banned Spencer’s Radix organization, as well as two accounts belonging to the American Renaissance.
YouTube banned several leading white nationalist accounts today, banning Richard Spencer, Stefan Molyneux and David Duke. https://t.co/eQWVWrleft
— Will Sommer (@willsommer) June 29, 2020
The move comes a day after Reddit purged over 2,000 subreddits from its website for violation of policy, including the President Donald Trump fan subreddit The_Donald. Twitch also suspended Trump’s channel on their platform due to “hateful conduct,” reported The Guardian.
“In line with our policies, President Trump’s channel has been issued a temporary suspension from Twitch for comments made on stream, and the offending content has been removed,” said the company, according to The Guardian.