YouTube on Monday terminated channels belonging to high-profile white supremacists David Duke and Richard Spencer as major social media sites move more aggressively to tackle hateful content on their platforms, according to The Verge.
Spencer is a white nationalist leader credited with coining the term “alt-right.” David Duke is the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Also included in Monday’s bannings were Spencer’s National Policy Institute and accounts connected to American Renaissance, another white nationalist group. Right-wing internet commentator Stefan Molyneux was also banned, The Verge reports.
Earlier in the day, Amazon’s video streaming platform Twitch temporarily suspended President Trump’s account for “hateful conduct” related to a 2016 rally and his recent visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Additionally, Reddit announced it had banned 2,000 subreddits across different political spectrums, but most notably The_Donald, a notoriously toxic far-right community of nearly 800,000 that frequently broke rules and antagonized the company and other subreddits.
Spencer tweeted that he’d appeal the suspension, calling it a “systemic coordinated effort,” while Molyneux made the claim that YouTube “just suspended the largest philosophy conversation the world has ever known.”
I will appeal the suspension; however, this seems to be part of a systemic, coordinated effort.
— Richard 🦁 Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) June 29, 2020
Another prominent far-right figure, InfoWars host Alex Jones, was banned not just from YouTube but from Facebook, Apple and Spotify in 2018. In April, the Food and Drug Administration warned the conspiracy theorist to quit peddling faux Covid-19 cures during the pandemic.
