YouTube permanently removes extremist Alain Soral's two channels

YouTube France is cleaning up the extremist content broadcast on its platform. A few days after banning the comedian Dieudonné's channel, the Google subsidiary closed Monday, July 6, the two channels of Alain Soral, an emblematic figure of the extreme right. The first channel, “ERTV Officiel”, an acronym referring to the name of its site “Equality and Reconciliation”, had been active since 2010. In ten years, the approximately 1,200 videos published had accumulated more than 80 million views, for a total of 185,000 subscribers. “ERTV International”, opened last March, had only 15 videos and 3,200 subscribers.

According to indications from YouTube, Alain Soral has repeatedly violated his conditions of use, with "incitement to violence" and "violent extremism". The main channel url link now only displays a short message: " This account has been terminated due to serious or repeated breaches of YouTube rules prohibiting the use of hateful content ". This decision is irreversible, and, like Dieudonné, the essayist will not be able to recreate a channel on YouTube. However, videos showing it will still be authorized, as long as they respect the conditions of use of the platform.

New regulations

However, this is not the first time that YouTube has attempted to remove Alain Soral's videos. In June 2018, a week after being sentenced to two suspended prison terms for hate speech, his channel "ERTV Officiel" had been removed, for " non-compliance with community regulations ". But only two days later, the channel was available again. The moderators of YouTube had indeed finally decided to remove one of the three warnings prior to the ban after Alain Soral had appealed to the platform.

This time the situation is very different. In June 2019, YouTube’s policies were changed to be more intransigent about hate speech. The videos " alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities such as age, sex, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status ”were then clearly prohibited. Since the implementation of these new conditions of use, 25,000 channels have been removed for "incitement to violence" or "violent extremism". Among them, 10,000 were banned in the last quarter.

Social media sweep

Like the removal of Alain Soral's two YouTube channels, other recent decisions show a surge in social networks to act against online hatred, especially since the death of George Floyd, the African-American killed by a white police officer on May 25. The Twitch video streaming platform has temporarily banned the official Donald Trump channel for "broadcasting hate speech." Reddit has removed The_Donald, a forum with many racist and misogynist comments and calls for harassment. Facebook, for its part, has banned advertisements which claim that " people of a certain race, ethnicity, [...] sexual orientation [...] or migratory status were a threat [...] to others " "following the boycott of 800 participating advertisers to the #StopHateForProfit movement.