YouTube Launches Major New Crackdown on QAnon
THAT ESCALATED Q-UICKLY
The site said on Thursday that it would delete content that targets people with “conspiracy theories that have been used to justify real-world violence.”
Will Sommer
Updated Oct. 15, 2020 10:44AM ET / Published Oct. 15, 2020 10:59AM ET
YouTube launched a new crackdown on QAnon videos on Thursday, dealing another major setback to the pro-Trump conspiracy movement one week after Facebook launched its own purge of QAnon accounts.
In its announcement, YouTube said it would delete “content that targets an individual or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify real-world violence.”
That description, the site notes, would apply to QAnon, which the FBI considers a source of potential domestic terrorism. QAnon believers have been charged with a number of crimes that appear to be inspired by their support of the conspiracy theory, including two murders, a terrorist, and child abductions.
“Today we're further expanding both our hate and harassment policies to prohibit content that targets an individual or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify real-world violence,” YouTube said in a statement. “One example would be content that threatens or harrasses someone by suggesting they are complicit in one of these harmful conspiracies, such as QAnon or Pizzagate.”
It’s not clear how many videos will be deleted under the new policy, which YouTube plans to start enforcing today. But the prohibition on alleging that people or groups are involved in the cabal-like conspiracy sketched out by QAnon could result in a massive purge of QAnon videos, although it’s not clear how prevalent QAnon content is on the site.
The new YouTube policy doesn’t qualify as an official QAnon ban, but YouTube expects that it will drastically impact the QAnon community on the site. An earlier YouTube crackdown in 2019 resulted in tens of thousands of QAnon videos being deleted, while a change to the site's algorithms caused recommendations pushing people to QAnon channels to plunge, according to the platform.
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