YouTube removes 25,000 pages for hate speech

French comedian Dieudonne, White supremacist Richard Spencer and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke among those taken down

YouTube has seen enough of the French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. White supremacist Richard Spencer and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, too.

Their channels were among more than 25,000 shut down Monday by the online video sharing platform for violating its hate speech rules.

Dieudonne’s page, which was full of videos agitating against Jews, had some 400,000 subscribers. In a Facebook post, he blamed “Israeli pressures” for the removal.

“This deletion follows repeated violations of our YouTube community regulations,” Google France said in a statement, AFP reported.

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, many of the videos on the channel have agitated against Jews, French Union of Jewish Students President Noémie Madar told the French media.

Dieudonne has been convicted at least seven times in France for inciting racial hatred against Jews.

The comic is the promoter of the quenelle quasi-Nazi salute and the term shoananas — a mash-up of the Hebrew word for Holocaust and the French one for pineapple — which he uses to suggest the Holocaust never happened without openly violating French laws forbidding such denials.

Spencer, the founder of a white supremacist think tank, has advocated a white ethno-state that would exclude non-whites and Jews.