By James Barrett
On Wednesday, YouTube announced a sweeping ban on all content it deems “hateful” or “supremacist,” resulting in a reported “thousands” of channels being shut down. The announcement came the same day that YouTube demonetized conservative comedian Steven Crowder — one of the most popular independent content creators on the platform — after a writer for Vox complained that he had repeatedly mocked him for his identity.
“YouTube has always had rules of the road, including a longstanding policy against hate speech,” the company announced Wednesday in a statement. “Today, we’re taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.”
The company noted that the enforcement of its mass ban on “hate speech” will take a while to fully implement. “We will begin enforcing this updated policy today; however, it will take time for our systems to fully ramp up and we’ll be gradually expanding coverage over the next several months,” said YouTube.
The outright ban of those the company says has promoted content it believes “discriminatory” in any way follows another announcement earlier this year that it would demonetize channels that “repeatedly brush up against our hate speech policies” by barring them from working with the YouTube Partner ad program.
The company has specifically stressed that it will take aim at content it deems to be “white supremacist” or “white nationalist,” AFP notes. “The move comes after a call by world leaders in Paris last month to curb extremism online, following revelations about the livestreaming of a mosque massacre in New Zealand.”
But conservatives have noted a pattern by YouTube, along with other dominate social media platforms, of focusing mostly on voices from the right —and often lumping in mainstream conservatives with the far-right. Among those blasting YouTube over ideological bias is outspoken conservative Dana Loesch, who declared the progressives pushing for deplatforming as “the modern day book burners.”
“Progressives/socialists are the modern day book burners,” she tweeted Wednesday in a thread noted by Twitchy. “Everything they dislike must be silenced, any challenge to their thought banished, be it with deplatforming, milkshakes, or burning buildings. Speech must be all hive-mind. It’s at level ridiculous. Yet these are the folks that actually accuse the people they’re trying to silence of narrow-mindedness. Newsflash: We aren’t the ones pushing to deplatform and demonetize all speech with which we disagree.”
full story at https://www.dailywire.com/news/48090/youtube-announces-mass-ban-all-hateful-content-james-barrett