YouTube is increasingly taking action against channels that spread hate speech
Photo: DPAYouTube has banned far-right rapper Chris Ares' account for violating the platform's hate speech guidelines. The rapper, whose real name is Christoph Aljoscha Zloch, is close to the right-wing extremist Identitarian Movement and has been mentioned several times in reports by the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
A company spokesman said the Google subsidiary has "strict guidelines that prohibit hate speech on YouTube." Close any channel that repeatedly violates these guidelines. Since the guidelines were updated in 2019 to better respond to racist content, five times more videos have been removed than before. "We shut down over 25,000 channels for violating our hate speech guidelines."
Right-wing extremism expert Flemming Ipsen sees Chris Ares as an example of how right-wing extremists use the same strategies as influencers to subtly spread their ideology online. Right-wing extremists like Ares tried to approach young people as closely as possible, Ipsen said in a July interview with SPIEGEL.
"They appear to the outside world as if they were independent of traditional neo-Nazi organizations and would only stand for themselves," said Ipsen. Ares works with cadres of the so-called Identitarian Movement and has no fear of contact with people with a neo-Nazi past.
In mid-July, YouTube had already blocked three accounts of the identity movement. Including the channel of the prominent Austrian activist Martin Sellner.
Ares had almost 80,000 subscribers on YouTube and was also able to generate sales on classic online music platforms such as Spotify and iTunes. Ares, who was born in 1992, managed to top the hip-hop charts with his release "2014-2018" on iTunes. "This shows on the one hand the importance of distributing extremist music as download on the Internet and on the other hand the increased reach of identitarian rap music", according to the Bavarian Constitutional Protection Report 2019.
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