YouTube Won’t Ban Neo-Nazi Group Linked To Blaze Bernstein’s Murder

A picture of Atomwaffen members posted on Twitter. Image by Twitter

By Ari Feldman February 28, 2018

YouTube refuses to take down videos made by the neo-Nazi militia group Atomwaffen, the Daily Beast reported.

Atomwaffen has cells in over two-dozen states, and has been linked to (multiple murders over the past year.](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/atomwaffen-nazi-murder-bomb-plot_us_5a70825ae4b00d0de2240328) One of it’s members, Sam Woodward, has been accused of murdering Blaze Bernstein, a Jewish teenager from California.

The group posts neo-Nazi propaganda videos through its YouTube channel. The videos have been reported for violating YouTube’s terms of service, and they are now preceded by a message saying that “the following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.”

“We announced last June that we would be taking a tougher stance on videos that are borderline against our policies on hate speech and violent extremism by putting them behind a warning interstitial and removing certain features, such as recommended videos and likes,” a YouTube spokesperson said this week. “We believe this approach strikes a good balance between allowing free expression and limiting affected videos’ ability to be widely promoted on YouTube.”

Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman

Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. He covers Jewish religious organizations, synagogue life, anti-Semitism and the Orthodox world. If you have any tips, you can email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @aefeldman.

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