YouTube Finally Takes a Stand on Racist Creators

Multiple prominent white nationalist YouTube personalities lost their channels, Right Wing Watch reported Tuesday. As writer Jared Holt explains, “The move came as a shock to the white nationalist community, and now racist content creators are panicking.”

YouTube, like its fellow content sharing sites Facebook and Twitter, has struggled for years with whether, or how, to remove users’ racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and other hate-filled content. In 2017, the site updated its hate speech policies to ensure that advertiser content would not appear alongside videos that, as the YouTube blog explained, contain “gratuitously disrespectful language that shames or insults an individual or group.” It thus eliminated a revenue source for those content creators.

In 2019, YouTube once again revised its policies, “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.”

James Allsup, whom Holt calls “once one of the loudest voices peddling white supremacy on YouTube,” was among those whose channels were banned. The Eyes on The Right twitter account, which monitors white nationalists, also reported that YouTube channels for VDare, American Identity Movement and The Right Stuff were just a few of the other channels removed.

Those channels were singled out by the Anti-Defamation League earlier this month for being particularly egregious spreaders of hate on YouTube. In a comment to Right Wing Watch, an ADL spokesperson said, “As ADL documented, following YouTube’s June 2019 announcement of changes to their platform to reduce extremist content, significant anti-Semitic and white supremacist material continues to be accessible on the platform,” adding, “With the wave of bans yesterday, it appears YouTube is beginning to step up their efforts to clean up the site.”

In a Twitter announcement confirming his channel’s ban, Allsup, an attendee of the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Va., at which counter-protester Heather Heyer was killed, claimed that he had “no channel strikes, no violations, nothing,” that he merely received an email “telling me that my livelihood, my means to exercise my political voice … was taken away from me.”

According to Holt, as well as being part of white nationalist groups like American Renaissance and Identity Evropa, Allsup had “quietly obtained a position in his local GOP but was ousted after his worldview and white nationalist connections were exposed to an audience beyond his county Republican Party organization.”

VDARE has existed online since 1999. It was, Holt explains, even more successful in its attempts to enter the mainstream GOP. Employees at federal agencies sent links from the site to each other, as BuzzFeed first reported. VDare editor Peter Brimelow has claimed that America is under attack from nonwhites. As with Allsup’s message, the VDare Twitter account acknowledges the ban, but claims it never violated YouTube’s terms of service.

The American Identity Movement’s Patrick Casey, also an attendee of 2017’s Unite the Right rally, acknowledged the ban in a chatroom on the messaging app Telegram, but did not elaborate, saying simply, “AIM’s YouTube channel has been deleted.”

Read Right Wing Watch’s full report here.