While the white supremacist far-Right has scrambled to regroup after many of their social media accounts, websites, and chat servers have been shut down in recent months, antifascists must remain vigilant in stamping out the fires of the far-Right’s recruitment and radicalization system.
Recent articles have come out regarding the radical Right’s far reaching presence on YouTube, hypothesizing that the right has utilized YouTube’s platform because it is a stage for hateful content to spread isolated and unchallenged. On YouTube, any user need only find a single right-leaning video, which will then send them down a rabbit hole filled with hours upon hours of related white supremacist, misogynist, and/or far-Right content. With over 1.5 billion people accessing YouTube every month, YouTube must decide whether they will continue to provide their massively powerful platform for far-Right groups and personalities to recruit followers to their movements.
YouTube Complicity
Why has YouTube has allowed such hateful content to exist so abundantly on their platform, given their hate speech policy? A hate speech policy that is not enforced is as good as no policy at all.
Granted, YouTube has been notorious for malicious and unmoderated comments (a fact parodied by The Onion’s “YouTube Reaches 1 Trillion Racist Comments”) – begging the question if this chronicled toxicity is also part of why YouTube has become such a popular platform for the right. YouTube’s claims that it has limited advertising on racist videos and is working with NGOs and additional volunteer “Trusted Flaggers” to identify extremist content are half-hearted appeasements of advertisers and the public and do not indicate an actual investment of resources by YouTube to identify and remove this content from their platform.
YouTube claims the high volume of footage uploaded to YouTube is too large to sort through effectively; we find it hard to believe that Alphabet (the parent company of YouTube and Google) cannot use any of the $5.3 billion dollars it made in profit last year towards identifying and removing this content. It is laughable that Alphabet’s motto is “do the right thing”.
Videos
Our working group has spent hours researching far-Right videos on YouTube and has been horrified to see the disgusting content, high quantity, and the high view counts of these videos. These 10 videos are the most explicitly white supremacist ones we have identified, many of them glorifying Nazism; together they have over 500,000 views on YouTube, and all remain up on YouTube as of today. We demand that YouTube take them down immediately.
- “What is Nationalist Socialism?” by the Traditionalist Workers Party. TWP is an American far-Right white nationalist party that participated in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville as well as other White Lives Matter rallies alongside neo-Nazis. They were recently purged from Twitter. This National Socialist (i.e. Nazism) recruitment video includes blatantly anti-Semitic statements, such as the “Jewish power structure is about destroying what is good”. It has been viewed over 67,000 times.
- “We are winning” by the Traditionalist Workers Party. This video, which has been viewed over 13,000 times, celebrates the recent growth of white nationalism and incites hatred against Jews by spreading the conspiracy theory that the “international Jewish system”…”wants to enslave the entire planet” and “ensure that all of our children don’t have a future”.
- “About Vanguard America” by Vanguard America. Vanguard America is an American white nationalist party; you may remember them from the logo on the shield James Alex Fields Jr. carried at the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally before he killed Heather Heyer, or from their Hurricane Katrina First Response Team that only offered help to white people. They were also recently purged from Twitter. This white supremacist video relies on stereotypes of black people as violent rapists and conspiracies about the all-powerful lying Jewish media to recruit white members to this fascist organization.
- “Take Back Your Country, White Man” by Vanguard America. Vanguard America’s second video, an assault on the senses, documents Vanguard America’s campaigns against tolerance and diversity to recruit white members to white supremacy.
- “Why Blacks Riot” by American Renaissance. American Renaissance, founded by Jared Taylor, is a self-purported “think tank” that attempts to prove the racial inferiority of black people using racist pseudoscience. This video, which has nearly 100,000 views, argues that black people in groups are likely to riot, and do so as a pretext to rob white people.
- “Let the Awakening Begin” by ronatvan (channel of Romanian National Vanguard). Over 56,000 people have seen this video, which claims black people are inferior to white people and that “racemixing is murder”
- “Rise of the Sleeping Giant: White European Nationalism” by European American Vanguard. Over 17,000 people have seen this not-even-covert call for white people to start a race war, as a pre-emptive defense against white genocide. It glorifies white supremacist violence by featuring dozens of clips of white nationalist physical altercations, torch lit rallies, and marches from around the world.
- “Why Hitler Wasn’t Evil” by Unban Evallion. Evalion is a Nazi Holocaust denier who was kicked off YouTube in 2016 for after she sang happy birthday to Hitler and called black people ”n*****” in her videos. Yet this re-upload, glorifying Nazism and denying the Holocaust, has nearly 83,000 views; many additional re-uploads of this video are also widely available on YouTube.
- “The Ultimate Red Pill” by EstelleNation. With over 140,000 views, this video spends 1 hour and 18 minutes glorifying Nazi Germany and advocating for a return to Nazism. It sprinkles in Hitler’s anti-Semitic speeches with images of modern political, tech, and media figures and calls international Jewry a “demonic threat”.
- “Adolf Hitler – Why We Fight” by Zonwending. This video, which has been viewed over 170,000 times, overlays modern footage of black and Muslim people in various countries with a speech by Hitler explaining the need to defend the German state for the Volk. The call to race war is clear.
Take Action
We must hold YouTube accountable for their complicity in spreading white supremacy worldwide. Enough with the disingenuous excuses – YouTube must prioritize the safety of marginalized peoples over corporate profits and appearances. Antifascists and antiracists need now to apply pressure for YouTube to take action.
We encourage everyone to report these videos on YouTube to demand their removal. We have built a Google Chrome plug-in that will allow anyone to more easily report this content to YouTube.
- Download the Google Chrome plugin from the Google Chrome store here or by going to https://chrome.google.com/webstore/ and searching “No Platform for Fascism.”
- Once installed, click on the red and black flags in the top right corner of your Google Chrome browser. Click the circle arrow refresh button to load videos. Click “Start Reporting.”
- The plugin will open the first YouTube video in a new tab (and should auto-fill the report form for you, though you can customize the message if you’d like). Once the report form is complete, press “Submit” to submit your report. You have now reported this video!
- To continue reporting the remaining videos, in the banner at the top, click “Next video,” and then “Report”; repeat Report process. As you report videos, the plugin banner will update with the count of how many videos you have reported and how many views they have.
We will continue to target additional white supremacist YouTube videos, profiling them on our Facebook and Twitter and uploading them into the Google Chrome plugin for mass reporting.
A broad-based movement against white supremacy should use many tactics, including targeting the far-Right’s online infrastructure. Share this article and tool with your networks (including with family over the holidays), help us report these videos, and ensure there are no platforms – including YouTube – for fascism!
For more info: [email protected]
via itsgoingdown.org
