YouTube banned a group of white nationalists from the platform.
Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, and Richard Spencer were among a group of people whose channels were suspended from the platform on Monday, according to the Verge. The ban, which also included white nationalist publication American Renaissance, followed repeated policy violations from the channels by alleging that protected groups and minorities are inferior.
“We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies,” a YouTube spokesperson said. “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.”
Spencer posted a photo of the notification he received from the platform on Twitter and wrote, “I will appeal the suspension; however, this seems to be part of a systemic, coordinated effort.”
The notification that he shared said he had committed “repeated or severe violations” by posting content that is “glorifying or inciting violence against another person or group of people.”
Molyneux tweeted that YouTube “just suspended the largest philosophy conversation the world has ever known.”
YouTube updated its hate content platform rules about a year ago.
“We’re taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting 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. This would include, for example, videos that promote or glorify Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory,” the platform wrote in a blog post at the time.
[Related: Reddit bans large pro-Trump group for violating hate speech rules]
