James Owens concealed hate speech about Jewish people on his YouTube channel, using terms such as “people who look white but aren’t” and referring to Hitler as “our uncle.” A UK-based neo-Nazi has had over 700 hours of content removed from YouTube recently, after it was revealed by the Times that he was using code words to refer to Jewish and Black people, in order to get around the video sharing platform’s hate speech filters. James Owens, a 37-year-old sports journalist, operated a YouTube channel under the fake name “the Ayatollah,” using the platform to regularly spread carefully concealed hate speech about Jewish people, using terms such as “people who look white but aren’t” and referring to Hitler as “our uncle.” His carefully chosen codewords, along with his use of a fake name, a fake profile picture and a fake accent, helped him to evade detection from YouTube’s artificial intelligence filters designed to prevent hate speech. However, due to several missteps on his part, he was successfully identified and tracked down, The Times reported. According to The Times, Owens’s real appearance first become known after he introduced himself as “the Ayatollah” to an infiltrator at a neo-Nazi event. His second error was to describe on his YouTube channel how he had been wearing a Hawaiian shirt at a far-right gathering, which just so happened to have been captured on film by a group of anti-fascist campaigners.
via jpost: British neo-Nazi used codewords to evade hate speech filters on YouTube