YouTube has taken down the Nation of Islam (NOI) channel from its platform.
According to YouTube, the NOI channel was removed on Oct. 2 for violating YouTube’s policies against hate speech, specifically the notion that members of a protected group are part of an evil conspiracy theory.
“We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement to the Journal. “After updating our guidelines last year to better address content that spreads hateful conspiracy theories, we saw a 5x spike in video removals and have terminated over 25,000 channels for violating our hate speech policies.”
NOI did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) wrote in a July blog post that Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is the “most popular anti-Semite in America.” The ADL noted in that post that Farrakhan said during a July 4 speech “that Jews are enjoined by their religion to poison prophets and that Jews had ‘broken their covenant relationship with God.’ He referred to Jews collectively as ‘Satan’ and the ‘enemy of God,’ and claimed that white people “are born with lie [sic] and murder in their nature.”
Since August 2019, YouTube also has removed several white nationalist figures from its platform, including David Duke and Richard Spencer in June.
