YouTube has taken down accounts from white supremacists including David Duke, Richard Spencer, and Stefan Molyneux, permanently banning them from the site. The video platform banned six accounts in total for hate speech on June 29: Spencer, Duke, and Molyneux’s personal channels, Spencer’s channel for his National Policy Institute/Radix Journal, the white-nationalist group American Renaissance, and its offshoot AmRen Podcasts. “We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies,†YouTube said in a statement to outlets. The site updated its hate speech policies a year ago, making it easier to crack down on the white-supremacist and far-right content that runs unchecked in many corners of the internet; today, YouTube claims to have banned over 25,000 accounts for hate speech.
Elsewhere, Reddit also banned over 2,000 far-right and white-supremacist subreddits after implementing a hate speech policy on June 29. Banned subreddits include r/The_Donald, a Trump-related subreddit that supports white-supremacist content, and r/ChapoTrapHouse, the subreddit for the popular podcast. Other subreddits banned include r/GenderCritical, r/CumTown, r/DarkHumorAndMemes, and r/soyboys. “We are committed to working with you to combat the bad actors, abusive behaviors, and toxic communities that undermine our mission and get in the way of the creativity, discussions, and communities that bring us all to Reddit in the first place,†CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman wrote in a post on the site. Neither of these sites have touched Donald Trump yet, although the livestreaming platform Twitch placed a temporary ban on the president’s account on June 29 for “hateful conduct,†in part because of a rebroadcast of the 2015 rally when he called Mexicans “rapists,†along with racist comments on a broadcast of his June rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.