Just days after Facebook and Instagram pulled the plug on white supremacist James Allsup’s accounts, YouTube followed suit, banning Allsup’s account as part of a broader crackdown on neo-fascist and white nationalist accounts.
A YouTube spokesperson declined to comment to ThinkProgress specifically on Allsup’s ban, but pointed to YouTube’s recent efforts to enforce a crackdown on white supremacist content. Allsup’s former account now reads that the “account has been terminated for a violation of YouTube’s Terms of Service.”
Allsup’s removal was one of a number of take-downs yesterday, including white supremacist organizations like VDare.
It's great that Youtube banned the white supremacist site VDare. What would be even better is if Google banned VDare across all its products — like Google News, a platform which supposedly reviews websites before presenting them as legit news sources: https://t.co/Et1yWCkMCw https://t.co/rOjHsd2C8v pic.twitter.com/D0mBcmB0EN
— Natalie Martinez (@natijomartinez) August 26, 2019
The ban follows a litany of other embarrassments for Allsup, who achieved notoriety for marching alongside a “pro-white” group in the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — a march in which a fellow white supremacist killed a woman with his car. Allsup had previously been banned by companies like Uber and Twitter, which suspended Allsup’s account in late 2017.
YouTube’s ban follows an earlier move to demonetize Allsup’s account, removing his ability to run ads against his video. The white supremacist said that led to a “significant” financial hit.
Allsup has a well-documented history of public white supremacy and outright bigotry. He’s claimed membership with the white supremacist Identity Evropa group, encouraging other members of the group to join local Republican Party institutions. (Allsup is a former head of Washington State University’s College Republican chapter.) According to The Inlander, a newspaper based in Eastern Washington, Allsup has not only called for “voluntary racial segregation,” but has claimed there are “intelligence differences between the races.” Before his Twitter was removed, Allsup also retweeted white supremacist Richard Spencer “countless times.”
As the Inlander noted, Allsup also appeared on a neo-Nazi podcast in 2018. “Allsup and the co-hosts laugh at a [podcast] segment joking about the ‘Jew York Times,’ and using slurs like ‘kike,’ ‘crack head n—-ers,’ ‘yid bitch’ and ‘faggots,'” the newspaper wrote.
On Gab, a social media platform infested with fascists and white supremacists, Allsup complained that his “means to exercise [his] political voice” had been “taken away from [him].” Of course, there’s nothing preventing Allsup from exercising his “political voice” on other sites, or in public. However, his ability to use YouTube as a platform to broadcast his bigotry is no more.