YouTube cracks down on far-right videos

A week after the Florida shooting, many of the videos on YouTube's "Trending" list contained misinformation about the teenage survivors of the shooting

YouTube this week cracked down on the videos of some prominent far-right actors and conspiracy theorists, continuing an effort that has become more visible since the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, last month caused a torrent of misinformation to be featured prominently on the site.

A week after the shooting, many of the videos on YouTube’s “Trending” list contained misinformation about the teenage survivors of the shooting. The top video on the list for some time falsely claimed that a student at the school, David Hogg, was a paid actor. That video and others like it led to intense criticism of the site. Since then, many prominent right-wing personalities have reported that YouTube has issued them strikes, which the site uses to enforce its community guidelines. If a channel receives three strikes within three months, YouTube terminates it. 

The company’s guidelines prohibit “videos that contain nudity or sexual content, violent or graphic content, harmful or dangerous content, hateful content, threats, spam, misleading metadata, or scams.” Mike Cernovich, the right-wing agitator and conspiracy theorist, said Wednesday that his channel, which has more than 66,000 subscribers, had been given a strike. (Cernovich said Saturday that YouTube had reversed the strike and that the video that had been banned was again available on the site.)

Infowars, the conspiracy theory outlet headed by Alex Jones, said Tuesday that it had received a second strike in two weeks, both for videos about the Parkland shooting. (Infowars, which has more than 2.2 million YouTube subscribers, later said the second strike had been removed.) Infowars’ Washington bureau chief, Jerome Corsi, said on Twitter that his YouTube channel had been terminated without notice or explanation. News outlets including The Outline and Breitbart have pointed to more than a dozen other right-wing or right-leaning accounts that have been disciplined, claiming they have either received strikes or been banned outright in the past several weeks.

They include the violent neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen and the YouTube star Carl Benjamin, known by his username Sargon of Akkad, who criticizes feminism and identity politics. Benjamin posted a screenshot on Facebook on Thursday that said he had been locked out of his Google account because “it looked like it was being used in a way that violated Google’s policies.”

  

YouTube said it was not aware of any prominent accounts that had falsely reported strikes, though it did say that Benjamin had violated its policy on copyright infringement. YouTube denied that the deletions and other actions were ideologically driven. It said accounts that had been disciplined or banned were only the most prominent, and vocal, of many across the ideological spectrum.

© 2018 The New York Times News Service