YouTube, Twitch, And Reddit Ban Far-Right Lunatics Several Years Too Late

Three of the biggest tech sites have wielded the ban hammer. YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit have booted the internet's most vile, hateful monsters, including the President, from their platforms for spreading hate speech. The Trump subreddit r/The_Donald was banned after have been quarantined for months, and the president's Twitch channel, where he could be seen offering up some choice Sekiro boss fight strategies, was merely suspended. Noted racists David Duke, Richard Spencer, and Stefan Molyneux were all banned from YouTube.

This would have been great news, say, four or five years ago, back when so many of us were shouting loudly that all the aforementioned racists were, in fact, very racist. For as nimble as the tech world claims to be, it took a strangely long time to do something about the problems posed by these, once again, very racist people. In the case of The_Donald, all Reddit did was bulldoze an abandoned building. After the subreddit's quarantine, tons of the nearly 750,000 Trump supporters who populated r/The_Donald moved on to a variety of different platforms where they were free to shout their racial slurs into an echo chamber and then use the echo as proof that someone out there agrees with them.

The YouTube bans only happened because, in June of 2019, YouTube started getting a little stricter in its removal of 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." The channels they banned kept being super-racist despite having been issued several warnings. It's bonkers that David Duke, who is known primarily as being a Nazi-sympathizer and having been the head of the KKK, was even allowed to have a YouTube channel in the first place. What did YouTube think he was going to do with it? Become a Foodtuber and make creme brulee instructional guides where the browned sugary shell on top is symbolically holding down all the white custard beneath it?

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Top Image: Whitehouse.gov/Wikimedia Commons