YouTube terminated the account used by white nationalist hate group VDARE for violating the site’s policies against hate speech, a YouTube spokesperson told Right Wing Watch. This time last year, VDARE was suspended and reinstated on the platform, but a YouTube spokesperson told RWW that this suspension is permanent.
“A false-positive review resulted in the prior termination and reinstatement,” a YouTube spokesperson told RWW.
According to YouTube, VDARE’s account “VDARE TV” violated its policies by alleging that members of groups protected by the site’s policies were innately inferior to others and by linking to hateful content off-platform, among other violations.
“We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies. 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,” a YouTube spokesperson told RWW via email.
VDARE, founded by Peter Brimelow in 1999, is a far-right political organization that has promoted and published work from racists, anti-Semites, and white nationalists. Vox reported in 2018 that Brimelow was “basically one of the alt-right’s founding fathers” and noted that VDARE once published a defense of the violence that took place during the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist gathering, where a white supremacist murdered counter demonstrater Heather Heyer.
Earlier this summer, YouTube suspended channels owned by far-right political entertainer Stefan Molyneux, white nationalist outlets American Renaissance and Radix Journal, as well as longtime Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
