BitChute
YouTube has terminated the account of a 14-year-old creator who is known for hateful, anti-Muslim videos after a recent video seemed to call for violence against gay people, BuzzFeed News reports.
The 12-minute video, called “Pride and Prejudice,” came from far-right YouTuber Soph. It focused on the LGBTQ community and included a line of threats at the end of the video. The video also asked viewers to blame Soph in “your manifesto,” a reference to online documents that mass shooters have published on sites like 8chan.
YouTube terminated the channel because Soph accumulated three community guideline strikes in 90 days and violated the company’s policies on hate speech, a spokesperson told The Verge. YouTube updated its policies on hateful content earlier this year in an effort to prevent harmful videos from spreading. Soph previously caught the attention of YouTube’s executive team after a lengthyBuzzFeed report detailed a number of disturbing videos, one of which included a direct threat against YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.
At the time, YouTube took down a couple of Soph’s videos, citing rules stating that the “platform is for children 13 and older,” and she had uploaded the videos prior to turning 13. But the company didn’t actually comment on the content of Soph’s videos. Areas like hate and harassment tend “to be quite hard in terms of actually determining where you draw the lines or don’t draw the lines,” YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan told Recode’s Peter Kafka on a podcast while talking about Soph.
“And so what our raters will do, if some of those videos are enqueued as potential candidates for policy action, is they will review them against our policies,” Mohan added, explaining the company’s review process. “And in some cases, some of those videos … the content might be something that lots of users might find objectionable but are not violating our policies as they stand today.”
After the channel was removed, Soph tweeted a photo of herself with a gun, writing “youtube headquarters here I come,” according to BuzzFeed. She later deleted it, calling it a joke. YouTube’s head campus in San Bruno, California, was the site of a shooting last year.
Along with her YouTube channel, Soph’s Patreon account has also been removed. She is still making content on a number of alternative websites like BitChute and selling merchandise.