YouTube banned several prominent far-right figures from its platform on Monday, including white nationalist leader Richard Spencer and right-wing internet personality Stefan Molyneux.
The bans also include two accounts associated with white nationalist group American Renaissance, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, and NPI/Radix, an organization founded by Spencer. The crackdown comes after YouTube pushed other white nationalists off its platform earlier this year.
The banned accounts repeatedly broke YouTube rules against alleging that certain groups are inherently worse than others, according to YouTube.
ADVERTISEMENT
“We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies,” a YouTube spokesperson 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, a Canadian who styles himself as a philosopher, had amassed more than 900,000 subscribers on YouTube with his videos, which often featured Molyneux performing long monologues about his beliefs. He has frequently suggested that Black people and other non-white groups are innately inferior to white people, and praised the idea of all-white countries after a trip to Poland.
Despite those remarks, Molyneux has found at least one prominent fan, Donald Trump Jr., earning frequent retweets from him.
Molyneux disputed his ban on Twitter on Tuesday, calling it an “egregious error” and asking YouTube to reconsider.
Paypal banned Molyneux from its payment platform in 2019.
