Hate speech fills comments of YouTube livestream of House hearing on hate speech on YouTube

Image: Aytac Unal/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

As the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on hate crimes and white nationalism began, the filled up with anonymous users making antisemitic and white supremacist . The livestream chat was quickly disabled once screenshots of the live chat began to spread on social media.

A few hours into the hearing, Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary, brought up a on the hate-filled livestream comments published earlier during the hearing.

Rep. Nadler read a few quotes that were pulled from the livestream chat before it was disabled.

“These Jews want to destroy all white nations,” said one comment Nadler read from YouTube.

“Anti-hate is a code word for anti-white,” said another.

Google, which owns YouTube, has a representative of its public policy team speaking as a witness at Tuesday’s hearing.

“Hate speech has no place on YouTube. We’ve invested heavily in teams and technology dedicated to removing hateful comments / videos,” said YouTube in response to the shutdown of the livestream chat. “Due to the presence of hateful comments, we disabled comments on the livestream of today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing.”

While YouTube was able to shut down the official Congressional committee livestream, hate speech in unofficial livestream chats covering the hearing.

Along with witnesses from civil rights groups and conservative activists, Facebook also had a representative from its public policy team in attendance.