YouTube Bans Prominent White Supremacist Channels

Google’s YouTube has banned several white supremacist channels.

Those banned include some of the net’s most high-profile far-right commentators, including former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke; Canadian white nationalist activists/conspiracy theorist Stefan Molyneux; and U.S. white supremacist Richard Spencer, said to have coined the term “alt right.”

“We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies,” a YouTube said in a statement. “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.”

Molyneux took to Twitter to call his channel’s banning an “egregious error,” and a Spencer tweet called YouTube's decision part of a “system coordinated effort,” saying he would appeal it, reported BBC News.

Separately, Amazon’s Twitch announced a temporary ban on President Trump over what it is calling his “hateful conduct,” and Reddit has taken a tougher stance on hate speech, resulting in the banning of the Trump-supporters group r/The_Donald and about 2,000 other subreddits.

Meanwhile, conservative activist groups are renewing their legal effort, recently rejected once by a D.C. Circuit of Appeals panel, to accuse Google, Twitter, Facebook and Apple of violatin the First Amendment and antitrust laws by conspiring to suppress conservative views.

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