June 5, 2019

(JTA) — A Washington state man who pleaded guilty to threatening to kill Jews was sentenced to one year in jail.

Dakota Reed, 20, was arrested in December weeks after the Anti-Defamation League tipped off the FBI about social media posts threatening to kill Jews praying in a synagogue or kids in school. He was charged with two felonies.

Reed was not charged with a hate crime, since his posts skirted the letter of the law under the Washington state statute.

He pleaded guilty in May to two counts of threats to bomb or injure property for his hate speech on several fake Facebook accounts, which were registered under pseudonyms.

“I would just like to apologize and let you know I’m remorseful,” Reed said Tuesday in Snohomish County Superior Court, the local Heraldnet publication reported.

One year in prison is the maximum sentence allowed according to the charges.

In his social media posts, Reed never named a particular person or place he would target, but indicated he would shoot up a synagogue in 2025.

Reed also claimed to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan and said he wanted to emulate Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine worshippers in a South Carolina church in 2015.

Out on bond, Reed continued to post threats on social media.

(JTA) — YouTube is going to remove more hate speech and supremacist content from its video sharing service.

“Today, we’re taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting 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,” YouTube announced Wednesday on its blog.

The announcement cited as an example videos that “promote or glorify Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory.”

The announcement also said that YouTube “will remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place.”

YouTube, which is owned by Google, did not name any specific channels or videos, however.

The company also said that channels that “repeatedly brush up against our hate speech policies,” but don’t overtly violate them, would be removed from the YouTube Partner Program, which allows channel owners to place ads on their channels and share in the advertising revenue from their video posts.

The company also did not say how it would be able to track the violations, considering that more than 50- hours of new videos are added every minute, according to The New York Times.

Last month Facebook banned several bigoted public figures, including David Duke, Louis Farrakhan, and Alex Jones. The ban extended to their personal and professional pages, as well as to many of their fan pages.