YouTube shuts down far-right channels over hate speech
San Francisco (AFP) – YouTube on Monday shut down six far-right channels for violating rules against “supremacist” content, booting videos by David Duke, Stefan Molyneux and Richard Spencer.
The video sharing platform pulled the plug on the channels as online social media platforms face increasing pressure to crack down on hateful rhetoric.
“We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies,” YouTube said in response to an AFP inquiry about the move.
Since updating guidelines a year ago to better address supremacist content, YouTube saw a fivefold spike in video removals and has terminated more than 25,000 channels for violating hate speech policies, the spokesperson added.
As Predicted: Parler Is Banning Users It Doesn’t Like
Well, that did not take long at all. On Friday we predicted that just like every other social media platform out there, the new favorite among people who falsely say that Twitter is censoring conservatives, would start taking down content and shutting down accounts just like everyone else. Because, if you run any sort of platform that allows 3rd party speech, sooner or later you discover you have to do that. In Friday’s post, we highlighted Parler’s terms of service, which certainly allows for it to take down any content for any reason (we also mocked their “quick read on Wikipedia” style understanding of the 1st Amendment).
What we did not expect was that Parler would prove us right so damn quickly. Over the weekend, Parler was apparently busy taking down accounts.
Well I got banned from Parler
— Thor Benson (@thor_benson) June 27, 2020
And he was not the only one.
Pretty much all of my leftist friends joined Parler to screw with MAGA folks, and every last one of them was banned in less than 24 hours because conservatives truly love free speech.
— Respectable Lawyer (@RespectableLaw) June 26, 2020