YouTube’s started to feel like a pile of loaded guns left in a schoolyard over the past decade, the streaming platform having more or less having turned a blind eye to the racist, conspiratorial, nightmarish content its algorithms keep planting in front of its (often very young) audience. Today, however, YouTube announced that, from here on out, it will not only aim to reduce the spread of what it deems “borderline content and harmful misinformation” via recommendations, but also ban accounts that promote Nazism and other ideologies that foster discrimination.
As The Verge notes, this should result in the purging of thousands of channels. “Should,” of course, is the key word, as YouTube’s proven shockingly lax at executing its own guidelines regarding hate speech. That said, with these changes they say they hope to “prevent our platform from being used to incite hatred, harassment, discrimination and violence.” Facebook made a similar promise back in March.
In its post, YouTube says it will prohibit any “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.”
“This would include, for example, videos that promote or glorify Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory,” it continues. “Finally, we will remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place.”
A YouTube spokesman told The Verge that this effort will also remove videos that “claim Jews secretly control the world, those that say women are intellectually inferior to men and therefore should be denied certain rights, or that suggest that the white race is superior to another race.”
As for accounts that, as is often the case in Trump’s America, routinely couch their hate speech in lulz and irony—or, in YouTube’s words, “repeatedly brush up against our hate speech policies”—they’ll be restricted from monetizing their videos via ads or YouTube’s Super Chat feature.