YouTube Shuts Down Several White Nationalist Channels
A video on YouTube from the German neo-Nazi music band Lunikoff, in 2007. Image by Getty
By Aiden Pink August 28, 2019
Updated 1:20 p.m.
YouTube has closed the accounts of several white nationalist channels, Right Wing Watch reported Tuesday.
Among the most prominent white nationalists to be de-platformed by YouTube was James Allsup, the former president of a College Republicans chapter in Washington state who went on to march in the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 and associated with the white nationalist group American Identity Movement (formerly known as Identity Evropa). Allsup’s YouTube channel had more than 450,000 subscribers and nearly 73 million collective views, according to an Anti-Defamation League report from earlier this month.
“My livelihood, my means to exercise my political voice, my business I’d built over almost three years, was taken away from me,” Allsup wrote on Gab, a social media service popular with the so-called “alt-right.” Allsup, who reportedly had already been banned from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Uber, urged his followers to contact YouTube and urge them to reverse their decision.
Other pages that were suspended include the one belonging to American Identity Movement itself, the video channel of the prominent white supremacist podcast The Right Stuff, and the video channel of the anti-immigration website VDARE. (VDARE’s account has since been restored; the publication’s Twitter account shared an email from YouTube stating that their account was un-suspended because it “is not in violation of our Terms of Service.”)
The Department of Justice apologized last week for sending an email to immigration court employees with a link to a VDARE article that included anti-Semitic attacks on judges.
YouTube pledged in June to take down videos and accounts that promoted discrimination or denial of major historic events like the Holocaust or the Sandy Hook shooting.
But its approach hasn’t always been effective. The website also (briefly) took down videos from history teachers and anti-racism researchers. Two months later, it was reported that YouTube had accidentally paid a neo-Nazi vlogger thousands of dollars as part of a popular donation-sharing program.
Aiden Pink is the deputy news editor of the Forward. Contact him at pink@forward.com or follow him on Twitter @aidenpink
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