Youtube will be removing hundreds of thousands of videos that violate its rules.
The company says it will now ban supremacist content and remove all videos that deny well-documented atrocities like the Holocaust or the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school.
In a blog post, YouTube announced that it will be 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’s ban on supremacist content comes a few months after Facebook said it was banning white nationalist content from its platforms.
The Facebook ban came two weeks after the suspect in the terror attack at two New Zealand mosques streamed part of the massacre live on the platform. A manifesto allegedly written by the suspect revealed an association with white nationalist views.
According to CNN, YouTube has long faced criticism for allowing misinformation, false conspiracy theories and extremist views to spread on its platform, and for recommending similar content to users. It’s been shown that people who visited the site to watch videos on innocuous subjects, or to see mainstream news, have been given recommendations pushing them toward extreme content.
