Google told NBC News in a statement that it is working to remove reuploads if the antisemitism in the interview isn’t denounced in the video via added commentary.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been banned across social media, but this week he still found a megaphone.
Ye — the megastar formerly known as Kanye West — joined Jones’ far-right conspiracy theory outlet Thursday for an interview in which he announced his “love” for Adolf Hitler and Nazis. The unbridled antisemitism immediately captured the attention of the internet. While the content was overwhelmingly denounced, the interview — and the antisemitism expressed in it — still reached millions of people, thanks to reposted clips of the interview on mainstream social media platforms.
Now with clips of the interview being uploaded to YouTube, Google told NBC News in a statement that it is working to remove reuploads if the antisemitism in the interview isn’t denounced in the video via added commentary. Other platforms like Twitter have yet to explicitly address that type of spread.
Jones is perhaps best known for falsely claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting didn’t happen. Jones and Infowars had already 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 anywhere from about 10,000 views to slightly more than 1 million views.
But Ye’s interview had more than 3.1 million views as of publication. It was already Jones’ most-viewed video on his platform.
On other platforms, clips of the interview got millions more.
“Social media platforms reward the most contentious content, because people who oppose it engage with it to express their disgust, their anger, to say it’s wrong, and in doing so, platforms elevate that and give it an algorithmic boost,” Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said.
The backlash to Ye’s comments was swift and unprecedented, with major conservative figures who had aligned with Ye days or even hours before the interview moving to denounce him.
Late Thursday night, Ye tweeted screenshots of text messages purportedly between him and Elon Musk that showed Musk saying, “Sorry, but you have gone too far.
