YouTube bans Richard Spencer and David Duke a year after saying it would ban supremacists

Now, amid a series of similar actions by social media companies, he has finally closed his channels. Overall, YouTube took action on six high-profile white supremacist channels on Monday, including Stefan Molyneux, American Renaissance, and Spencer’s Institute for National Policy.

“We have strict policies that prohibit hate speech on YouTube and we cancel any channel that violates those policies repeatedly or egregiously. After updating our guidelines to better address supremacist content, we saw a 5-fold increase in video deletion and we’re done over 25,000 channels for violating our hate speech policies, “a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement to CNN Business.

YouTube said the channels repeatedly violated its rules by claiming that members of protected groups were innately inferior to others, as well as other violations.

When asked by CNN Business why it took so long to take action on these accounts, a YouTube spokesperson said that when channels accumulate enough breaches, it removes them. The spokesperson will not provide specific examples of the accounts or explain why he took action now.

The account withdrawals come at a time when other social networks are trying to clean up their platforms in the midst of a larger trial on racial equality. On Monday, Reddit announced a renewed content policy and banned some 2,000 subreddits, including a popular community that supports President Donald Trump, where users often shared racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and conspiracy content. Meanwhile, Facebook faces a growing boycott of advertisers about what marketers say are the failures of social media to stop the spread of hate. YouTube in particular has been criticized for radicalizing users through its algorithm, and its recommendations have been shown to push users towards extreme content.

Even with Monday’s actions, YouTube continues to play whack-a-mole with an account that it had previously deleted three times.

Last year, CNN Business discovered that a Nazi channel YouTube had previously removed was a backup and made no attempt to hide or connect to its previously banned accounts. The channel was first removed in April 2018 following a CNN investigation that found ads for more than 300 companies and organizations running on YouTube channels promoting white nationalists, Nazis, pedophilia, conspiracy theories, and North Korean propaganda. . The account was run by Brian Ruhe, who had emphasized to CNN in 2018 that he did not want to be referred to as a “neo-Nazi” because he considers himself a “real, genuine and sincere Nazi.” In a YouTube video posted by Ruhe last year, he and his friends celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday, with a cake with a swastika made of frosting and “Heil Hitler!” regards

On Monday, CNN marked a new account belonging to Ruhe, which YouTube later deleted. A YouTube spokesperson said that he cannot open another account if the first one was canceled. Ruhe’s last channel had amassed more than 38,000 views before being completed. It was created in August 2019.