YouTube announced Wednesday that it will remove thousands of videos and channels advocating bigoted ideologies such as white supremacy and neo-Nazism under a new policy to tackle extremism on the platform. The move comes as YouTube is facing intense scrutiny over its user standards. The policy will ban “videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion,” the company said in a blog post. “It’s our responsibility to protect that, and prevent our platform from being used to incite hatred, harassment, discrimination and violence.”
The policy also covers videos pushing conspiracy theories that allege violent incidents, like mass shootings, did not actually take place. InfoWars host Alex Jones continuously pushed a conspiracy theory—in part on YouTube’s platform—that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut was a hoax, and alleged that distraught families of the victims were “crisis actors.” Jones has since claimed he had a “form of psychosis” while making the false claims.
Read it at New York Times
