YouTube will be removing thousands of videos that either promote supremacy or deny well-documented tragedies such as the Holocaust or the Sandy Hook school shooting.
The company announced in a blog post, “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 ban is coming only a few months after Facebook said that it was banning white nationalist content from its site, which was in response to the terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand.
According to CNN, YouTube has been criticized for allowing videos that spread conspiracies, information, and radical views, and then recommending similar content to viewers of them. Even those who were watching mainstream, less harmful, news videos were recommended those extreme videos.
What frightens me most about YouTube’s format is what I mentioned in the last paragraph. I imagine some viewers of mainstream news YouTube videos are rather uneducated about current and will be impressionable enough to believe extreme views because they won’t know enough to refute them. This ban was definitely a step in the right direction.