YouTube Terminates Nation of Islam Channel for Egregious Hate Speech

YouTube has removed the National of Islam’s channel from its platform for violating the video-sharing site’s policies against hate speech, the Jewish Journal has reported. According to YouTube the Nation of Islam (NOI) channel was taken down specifically for promoting “the notion that members of a protected group are part of an evil conspiracy theory.” 

In a statement to the Jewish Journal, a spokesperson for YouTube said, “We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies. After updating our guidelines last year to better address content that spreads hateful conspiracy theories, we saw a 5x spike in video removals and have terminated over 25,000 channels for violating our hate speech policies.”

Last summer, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan gave a vile anti-Semitic July 4th speech where he referred to Jews collectively as ‘Satan’ and the ‘enemy of God.’ Farrakhan’s speech, which was viewed by over 800,000 people on YouTube, was also promoted by the rap artist Sean Combs (Puff Daddy) to his millions of Twitter followers. Farrakhan is often called the “most popular anti-Semite in America,” for his decades of promoting Jew-hatred.

The Combat Anti-Semitism Movement ran a successful campaign to have Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic July 4th speech removed from YouTube in July. While the July 4th speech was removed from the platform, the Nation of Islam’s channel remained live on YouTube until now.

The removal of the NOI YouTube channel is the latest effort by the company to limit those who use the platform to promote hate speech and violence. Last year, YouTube also removed the channels of far-right anti-Semites David Duke and Richard Spencer.

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