YouTube deletes popular channel of loud-mouthed French homophobe
YouTube has behaved much more responsibly than Twitter.
The far-right French anti-LGBT influencer Greg Toussaint had his YouTube channel deleted on June 1 after he used it to label homosexuals as pedophiles in order to incite hatred and denigrate school-based interventions against LGBTphobia.
Gumersindo (pseudonym), a member of the French LGBT advocacy group Stop Homophobie, describes here what the YouTube decision means for protecting LGBT people from online hate.
By Gumersindo
I’m not here to advertise Greg Toussaint and his community of haters who conduct online raids on social networks against their detractors.
On the other hand, I would like to use this case, which pits Stop Homophobie against Greg Toussaint, as an opportunity to congratulate YouTube for not waiting for a court decision before deleting video content that is clearly scandalous and insulting. In this sense, I’d like to salute YouTube’s good sense, with regard to its audience.
YouTube is a general entertainment platform, and masculinist content inspired by military aesthetics, in which groups and communities are attacked in order to harass them, has no place there.
YouTube’s decision means we don’t have to file a complaint against them, but it doesn’t extinguish the legal proceedings or the four complaints we’ve already filed to date against Greg Toussaint.
The fact that a YouTube channel with more than 360,000 subscribers and 75 million views can be deleted should also serve to make those who think that their notoriety serves as a free pass think again, because it is indeed possible to express one’s ideas quite simply.
I’d also like to draw attention to the contrast between YouTube and Twitter, which says it fully applies American law and the principle of freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. But in France, it’s only when a court verdict is handed down after a few years that Twitter decides to remove manifestly illegal content.
In any case, Twitter’s days in Europe are numbered, as the platform has been singled out for its complacency towards disinformation campaigns, which are a means of destabilizing our societies.
More than ever, Stop Homophobie’s web policing work continues, and we’re galvanized by YouTube’s positioning, which is why we’re receiving more and more requests on our hotline.
Finally, we invite the 76crimes readership to make reports on pharos concerning websites with criminal or contentious content. Pharos is an online reporting service for offenses committed on the Internet, run by the French national police force. A website like “touche pas à mon gosse“, for example, is currently on our radar, but it’s not the only one».
