The move comes as YouTube and fellow tech giants like Facebook and Twitter face blowback for stumbling in efforts to stop the spread of hate speech. | Patrick Semansky, File/AP Photo technology YouTube to ban supremacist content, purge videos

YouTube on Wednesday said it's banning videos promoting white supremacy, Nazism and other bigotry-boosting ideologies, as well as those denying that violent events like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary took place.

The ban expands on existing anti-hate speech rules "by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status," the Google subsidiary said in a blog post.


The ban will result in the deletion of thousands of videos already online, a spokesperson said.

"It’s our responsibility to ... prevent our platform from being used to incite hatred, harassment, discrimination and violence," the blog post reads. "We are committed to taking the steps needed to live up to this responsibility today, tomorrow and in the years to come."

YouTube is also bolstering previously announced changes to its video recommendations, seeking to direct users to fewer "borderline" videos that spread offensive speech or hoaxes without technically breaking any rules. The company hopes to bring those currently U.S.-exclusive changes to other countries by year's end, it said.

Channels that repeatedly post borderline videos will also be blocked from running ads or otherwise monetizing their content, YouTube added.

The move comes as YouTube and fellow tech giants like Facebook and Twitter face blowback in Washington and around the country for stumbling in efforts to stop the spread of hate speech. The companies spent years, for instance, dithering on whether far-right provocateur and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was breaking their rules by doing things like directing his followers to attack the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting. Facebook ultimatelybanned Jones for good last month as part of a broader crackdown on hate speech following a series of suspensions and deletions of Jones-affiliated pages.

Yet such moves have only drawn internet platforms further into thorny political fights over their role as modern public squares. Democrats are often outraged by their perceived inaction against incitements to hate, while Republicans hammer the companies for what they say is a chilling effect their content moderation decisions have on free speech.

"Am no fan of Jones," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tweeted following an earlier Jones suspension last year, "but who the hell made Facebook the arbiter of political speech?"

In the last week alone, YouTube has been at the center of two high-profile controversies over what critics say have been failures to address potentially dangerous content.

Vox journalist Carlos Maza went viral last week with a Twitter thread chronicling a longstanding pattern of conservative humorist Steven Crowder posting YouTube videos mocking Maza with homophobic and anti-Hispanic slurs. YouTube on Tuesday said it won't take action against Crowder because his videos, though containing "language that was clearly hurtful," didn't overtly break any rules.

Meanwhile, the New York Times on Monday reported that despite past efforts by the company to keep pedophiles off YouTube, some videos of semi-clothed children are getting up to hundreds of thousands of views, exacerbated by getting swept up into YouTube's video recommendation engine. The company said in a subsequent blog post that it's begun downplaying such videos' visibility but won't stop recommending them altogether.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) in a Tuesday tweet linking to the Times story, which he called "sickening," illustrated the political pressure that YouTube and other tech giants are under to improve their oversight of what happens on their platforms.

"Algorithms are amoral and platforms need human supervision," he said. "If they aren’t concerned about commercial or moral consequence, they should at least be worried about angering policymakers."

Alexandra S. Levine contributed to this report.