YouTube banned multiple prominent white supremacist commentators from its website on Monday, including longtime Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, accusing them of violating the company’s ‘hate speech’ policies.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the video streaming giant said channels belonging to Duke and far-right commentators Stefan Molyneux and Richard Spencer had been terminated for claiming that members of minority groups were inferior, according to a Verge report.
The decision comes after Reddit on Monday banned its largest forum dedicated to President Trump, claiming it violated their ‘hate speech rules,’ and video streaming service Twitch also temporarily suspended the president for sharing what it ‘hateful conduct.’
“We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies,” the YouTube spokesperson said.
“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,” they added.
In a tweet, Spencer, who has been labeled as a leading “academic racist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, said he would appeal the decision.
Molyneux also accused YouTube of suspending “the largest philosophy conversation the world has ever known.”
The move by YouTube is the latest example of social media giants removing or censoring content which they consider hate speech or misinformation.
Twitter has in recent months begun taking the unprecedented step of removing or flagging tweets from both President Trump and his campaign, tagging them as either misinformation, manipulated media or promoting violence.
The decision has angered the Trump administration which last month signed an executive order reducing the companies’ liability protections, arguing the platforms are “engaged in editorial conduct” and “censor content and silence viewpoints that they dislike.”