Is YouTube Playing (With the) Devil’s Advocate?

Is YouTube still a platform for First Amendment-protected free speech? According to the video sharing website’s policy on hate speech, it is—but its recent partnership with the hate-mongering Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) suggests otherwise.

According to the Daily Caller, the SPLC is quietly helping YouTube in “policing content” that constitutes hate speech or is promoted by “hate groups” on the video sharing platform. Along with a bevy of government agencies and left-wing nonprofits like the Anti-Defamation League, YouTube has included the SPLC in its “Trusted Flaggers” program for hunting down content the company opposes—an arrangement that also hides the groups involved behind a confidentiality agreement.

This is troubling news. The SPLC, which was founded to combat actual hate groups like the KKK, has itself become a hate group in a class of its own. In the words of Capital Research Center president Scott Walter:

Nobody ever accused the SPLC of being neutral or mainstream. It is, bluntly put, a far-left smear machine with ideological and venal motives for its famous list, which mixes some genuinely sicko groups with mainstream conservative groups the SPLC hopes to harm.

The SPLC makes no attempt to hide its radical ideology, which apparently considers anyone to the left of Mao Zedong a dangerous hatemonger. In a February 26 article on its website the group shamelessly distorts the largest annual meeting of conservatives in America: “Racists roam the halls of CPAC, and the conservative conference ends in controversy over racist comments.”

​For years the Conservative Political Action Conference has had an extremist problem –– budding white nationalists, young and excited leaders of the racist “alt-right” and angry voices in the anti-LGBT movement all cozying up with conservative political leaders and hoping to have their voices heard.

If the SPLC is living up to its ill-begotten reputation in its “Trusted Flagger” duties, conservative YouTubers ought to be wary of be smeared for promoting “hate.” In December, we published a video called “Right-Wing or Left-Wing, Identity Politics is Destroying America.” The video is a nonpartisan call for Americans to rise above the identity politics threatening our republic; but YouTube placed it in “limited content mode,” blocking it from view in the U.K. and 27 other countries. As CRC’s Joseph Klein wrote after our video was blocked for containing “inflammatory religious or supremacist content,”

This is not a case of conservative content on religion or immigration being censored for contradicting Silicon Valley’s worldview. This is a case of content directly opposing supremacist ideology being blacklisted as “supremacist” by the most powerful technology company in the world.

What’s worse, YouTube censored another CRC video, “The Dirty Secrets of Democratic Politics,” in February. I narrated that brief exposé on two Hillary Clinton campaign operatives who instigated violence at Donald Trump rallies during the 2016 presidential election. The video uses footage from the investigative journalist group Project Veritas, whose findings have been viewed by millions of people. Nevertheless, our video was temporary removed for “violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech.”

YouTube has since quietly reinstated both videos. Its anti-free speech agenda, however, seems to be here to stay.