Democrat officials are urging YouTube to scrub incel content from its platform.
Congressman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), along with nine other Democrat co-signers, sent an open letter to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai Oct. 25 calling YouTube an “easily-accessible [pathway] into the larger ‘incelosphere.'”
The letter cited a recent report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which examined 1,183,812 posts made by users on “the world’s leading public incel websites and pages, as well as content on YouTube.” The YouTube content had collectively amassed more than 24 million views, per the report.
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For those unfamiliar, incels—aka “involuntary celibates”–are men who believe women are sex dispensers, and that being denied sex is the source of all their problems.
As the letter states, incel ideology has been linked to the maiming or murder of over 100 people, mostly women, over the last decade. One of the more prominent examples is Elliot Rodger, an incel who killed six people and injured 14 more at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014. He left behind a sprawling, misogynistic manifesto echoing sentiments you’ll find in many online incel hovels.
CCDH’s investigation found that YouTube provides “a corpus of ideological instruction, recruiting material, and other content that encourages incels,” Schiff and Durbin wrote. “While incels have been described as loners or socially isolated, they in fact are embedded in highly active, densely-interconnected online communities that encourage and celebrate their horrific beliefs and acts.”
The letter asks Wojcicki and Pichai why YouTube hasn’t removed incel-related channels that presumably violate its Community Guidelines. It also asks if YouTube and/or Google have “performed any assessment of the threat posed by the fact that your platforms recommend and serve incel and male-supremacist content to young users,” and wants to know if Google will “commit to downranking the ‘feeder’ forums that are driving people to ‘incelosphere’ forums.”
YouTube’s Community Guidelines don’t specifically ban incel ideology, but as Schiff and other officials point out, it should be covered by YouTube’s existing policies against hate speech and harmful/dangerous content—or, at the very least, be considered borderline content worthy of suppression.
YouTube has not issued a public response to the letter.
