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Ye and big tech gave Infowars one of the best days ever


Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been banned from social media, but this week he still found a megaphone.

Ye – the superstar formerly known as Kanye West – joined Jones’ far-right conspiracy theory agency on Thursday for an interview in which he declared his “love” for Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Unbridled anti-Semitism immediately caught the attention of the internet. Despite the strong condemnation of the content, the interview – and the anti-Semitism it embodies – still reach millions thanks to interview clips reposted on mainstream social media platforms. .

Now, as clips of the interview have been uploaded to YouTube, Google told NBC News in a statement that it is working to remove the re-uploads if the anti-Semitism in the interview is not denounced. Report in the video via the additional comments section. Other platforms like Twitter have yet to explicitly address that type of contagion.

Jones is perhaps best known for falsely claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting did not happen. Jones and Infowars have been banned from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Apple, YouTube, Spotify, Google Play, Vimeo, Pinterest, Mailchimp and LinkedIn.

Jones now hosts his content on his own video platform called Banned, where broadcasts typically get from about 10,000 views to a little over 1 million views.

But Ye’s interview had more than 3.1 million views upon publication. It is already Jones’ most viewed video on his platform.

On other platforms, clips of the interview have garnered millions of views.

Imran Ahmed, Executive Director of the Center Against Digital Hate, said.

The backlash to Ye’s comments was swift and unprecedented, with major conservatives linked to Ye days or even hours before the interview turning to denounce him. .

Late on Thursday night, Ye tweeted a screenshot of a text message allegedly between him and Elon Musk, which featured Musk saying, “Sorry, but you’ve gone too far. This isn’t love. love”, immediately drew attention to Ye’s account and his interview that day.

Twitter prohibit Ye later that night after Ye tweeted an image with a swastika.

Despite the suspension, several retweets of the interview on Twitter received more than 3 million views.

Anti-hate groups and corporate advertisers have been pressing social media platforms for years alert on stopping the spread of online hate, arguing that sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube haven’t done enough to enforce their own rules.

“Someone says something disgusting and then re-posts the whole video, which does nothing but show disgust, but then it really amplifies that to a lot of people,” Ahmed said. speak.

“There’s an effect that it’s drawing people back to the Infowars platform, because they want to know where it’s coming from. It’s starting to normalize the notion that this kind of content is out there,” Ahmed said.

Several YouTube users uploaded full transcripts of the interview on Friday, according to an NBC News search on the platform. And while the full, unedited versions have only a few hundred views, right-wing commentators have posted lengthy clips from the interview mixing Ye’s anti-Semitic comments with their own reactions. . One of those videos by a right-wing commentator had 307,000 views, making Ye’s comments such as “I love Hitler” unnoticed by a large audience.

“This is one of the biggest problems in dealing with online hate,” said Bond Benton, an associate professor of communications at Montclair State University. “There’s a section of viewers that will say, ‘My hateful views are now normalized.’ And they’ll be a lot more comfortable expressing them personally and acting on them.”

The top search results for Ye-related terms on YouTube are mostly videos from established news organizations that provide context for the videos, but some commenters said they didn’t know what to do. much discussion on this issue.

“The easy thing to do is ignore it and not talk about it, but I have to talk about it because this is crazy,” said Greg Foreman, a conservative YouTuber, in a 15-minute video with more than 80,000 views. . He showed clips of Ye praising Hitler, and Foreman speculated that his channel might be on strike by YouTube as a result.

“The Alex Jones channel was terminated from YouTube in 2018 and in accordance with our fraud policy we are removing third-party uploads of his recent interview with Kanye West,” Jack said. Malon, a spokesperson for YouTube, said in an email.

“We may allow some of this content to exist on the platform, but only in the event of condemnation of hateful views that would otherwise violate our Community Guidelines,” he said.

On Facebook, some users uploaded short clips from the interview, often in the context of a news program but not always, according to an NBC News search. But clips without context seem to have very few views. A seven-minute video in which Ye makes anti-Semitic comments has only 48 views.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, says it’s following its establishment policy about “dangerous individuals and organizations.” Under that policy, Meta said it would “remove content that praises, supports or represents ideologies that promote hate, such as fascism and white supremacy.”

The top post on Reddit on Thursday was a repost from the interview. Two other posts in Reddit’s top 20 posts that day were also reposted, and both videos featured the Infowars logo. The videos contain specific segments of the interview where Ye praises Hitler and the Nazis, portraying them in a negative and shocking light. Responding to NBC News, Reddit pointed out content policyincluding banning content and communities that attack vulnerable and vulnerable people and groups.

The biggest social media platform Ye still has a presence in seems to be TikTok. His verified account has 1.9 million followers, though as of Friday afternoon his most recent TikTok video is from October 13.

A short clip of Ye’s interview without context has had 82,700 views, and although searches for Hitler’s name on TikTok returned no results, the person who posted the clip used a slight variation. of this name. The clip had more than 300 comments, including some from people siding with Ye.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment and to provide more information about its enforcement.

“There is a devastating consequence to the normalization of anti-Semitism,” Ahmed said. “Nobody needs to be reminded of what can lead.”

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