YouTube banned six accounts used by high-profile white nationalists on Monday. According to YouTube, the respective channels “repeatedly or egregiously violated our policies by alleging that members of protected groups were innately inferior to others, among other violations.”
The removed accounts include those owned by far-right political entertainer Stefan Molyneux, white nationalist outlets American Renaissance and Radix Journal, as well as longtime Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. YouTube also removed two associated channels: one belonging to alt-right poster boy Richard Spencer and another hosting American Renaissance podcasts.
“We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies. 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,” a YouTube spokesperson told Right Wing Watch in an email.
In June 2019, YouTube took a more aggressive stance on its policy against hate speech. Since the policy has taken effect, several high-profile hate movement figures have been kicked off the site, including white nationalist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes and Proud Boys hate group founder Gavin McInnes. Right Wing Watch reported that last year YouTube banned a handful of white nationalist accounts, including those used by far-right podcaster James Allsup, the anti-immigrant outlet VDARE, the neo-Nazi podcast network The Right Stuff, and the white nationalist group American Identity Movement (formerly called Identity Evropa). YouTube later reversed course and reinstated VDARE.
