Youtube logo is seen on an android mobile phone. (Photo by Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) (Getty Images)
YouTube on Tuesday pulled the plug on a livestream of a House committee hearing about festering white nationalism — after chats on the video quickly filled up with vile racist and anti-Semitic hate speech.
“Hate speech has no place on YouTube. Due to the presence of hateful comments, we disabled comments on the livestream of today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing,” YouTube said on Twitter.
Several livestreams on YouTube were slammed with racist and anti-Semitic posts in live chats just moments after the hearing started, NBC News reported.
And while YouTube said the comments were eventually disabled, comments and chat features on other YouTube streams remained live through the morning and were filled with racist and anti-Semitic language.
The hearing featured witnesses from civil rights groups who testified about the rise of white nationalism and race-related violence, as well as the role technology plays in the spread of hate speech.
Some called on President Trump to more forcefully condemn white nationalism than he did after the deadly Charlottesville, Virginia white nationalist riots, when he said there were fine people on both sides of the fight.
Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, sent officials to the hearing who touted their companies efforts to thwart hate speech, the network reported.
“We take these issues seriously and want to be part of the solution. We understand that tough policies must be coupled with tough enforcement,” Alexandria Walden, Google’s global policy chief on human rights and free expression, told the lawmakers.
This story originally appeared in the New York Post.
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