If you’re looking for more evidence that truth is indeed stranger than fiction (excluding, of course, the fiction of Chuck Tingle), consider the case of the now-banned Youtuber Evalion, a teenaged Hitler enthusiast with a disconcertingly young-sounding voice who made videos praising the Führer for, among other things, his love of dogs. On his birthday, she baked the dead German leader swastika cupcakes and sang “happy birthday” to a picture of him she tacked on the wall.
In recent weeks, the Hitler-lover with the baby voice was just beginning to hit her stride, Youtube-wise, with her videos Why Hitler Wasn’t Evil and How to Identify A Jew garnering hundreds of thousands of views each. Her follower count leapt to more than 40,000. Meanwhile some of her fans on Reddit started up a subreddit devoted to her.
Earlier today, after being called out by several Youtubers with fan bases even bigger than hers, she was banned by Youtube for her obvious violations of the site’s not-terribly well-enforced rules against hate speech. She started up a second channel but this, too, was quickly banned. I would say that she did Nazi that coming, but she clearly did.
On Twitter, her foul fans cried foul.
https://twitter.com/Burzenland/status/732739006903910400
https://twitter.com/Samisdat14/status/732734351515996160
So the cucks finally got Evalion's YT channel shoad'd.
— 👌🏻)))Jay(((👌🏻 (@JAYLXXXVIII) May 17, 2016
https://twitter.com/ARShitlord2/status/732639546467311616
Another alt-right Twitterer declared that “Everyone needs to Harrass [the] fa***t … who encouraged people to report Evalion’s YouTube channel!!!”
Even before her channel got pulled down, Internet Nazis and other sh*tlords were rallying around her. On the Daily Stormer, Andrew Angelin warned his readers that the “Evalion is being lynch-mobbed by groups of whining fa***ts,” and urged them to download her videos so they could put them up on their own channels later. (Apparently, some of them did.)
Several other familiar names tried to get a hashtag going:
https://twitter.com/TheRalphRetort/status/732636863937323008
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/732673636851679234
The outrage from the usual suspects is certainly predictable enough, as is the fact that Evalion is, you guessed it, a Trump supporter.
What makes the whole thing so surreal is Evalion herself. Or at least THAT VOICE.
Evalion says she’s 18, and (as you can see from the pictures above) she looks likes she probably is around that age. But she sounds more like she’s eight, and it’s more than a little disconcerting to hear someone who sounds that young going on about the alleged evils of “the International Jewish Community.”
Here are a few snippets, which I took from a mirrored copy of perhaps her most notorious video, Why Hitler Wasn’t Evil.
Is the voice a put on? Is she a put on? Is this all an elaborate troll job? I don’t think so. In some of her other videos she doesn’t sound quite so young as she does here, but this is apparently pretty close to how she really talks. She seems sincere to me, and certainly her fans on the far-right have no problem believing she’s for real.
With her videos down, and the mirrored videos likely to be taken down, the only way to see and hear just what it was that got her banned is through the videos of her many critics, the most famous ones being LeafyIsHere, who made two videos about her, and Onision, whose call for his Twitter followers to “flag this woman’s hate speech into non-existence” is almost certainly what got her channel taken down. (I’m a little hesitant about linking to either of these guys; Leafy makes videos about what he sees as the cringiest people on Youtube; what this means is that, as Gizmodo once put it, he “Makes Money Bullying People With Learning Disabilities.” Onision has said all sorts of problematic things.)
Now LeafyIsHere is pondering whether or not he should try to get YouTube to reinstate her channel. That seems unlikely, but somehow I suspect we have not seen or heard the last of Evalion.
I’ll try to be fair with this. In the abstract I can see how this might be the standard. Independent of government the rest of society can functionally suppress speech in ways that would be a problem. I can imagine this as the situation here in the US in decades and centuries past as many minority groups wanted to be heard.
But this comment is still unhelpful with respect to how speech is causing problems on many issues, in a de facto sense if nothing else. Perhaps you can offer something more specific on areas of concern? If you have knowledge in this area you could be useful with phrasing and rhetoric related to how the term “free speech” is used when critics of social justice issues use it.
I disagree. If Youtube decided that it would ban racist content all it would take was for racists to set up their own video site. I can see how it might be a problem at the level of hosting of content, but again racists might be able to set up their own hosting services (I say might because I am admittedly ignorant of this area). When it comes to simply using the internet I would be on the same page as you since that I think that would qualify as a public good.
I agree that they should have a means of making their content available to anyone who might want to see it but I’m not convinced that Youtube level companies is a good choice. I’ll give another reason why below.
I think that directed harassment we would agree on. Targeted speech might get tricky depending on its nature. But an example I have encountered on more than one occasion was where commentators were banned and made free speech arguments about why they should not be banned. If the law were to prevent something like Youtube from choosing to restrict speech, what about a blog? If Youtube can’t decide on community standards that could ban bigoted speech or similar kinds of community standards would the law let a blog owner or even a blog network do and if so how would that be justified under the law?
What about sites that would want to suppress particular kinds of speech in order to correct for institutionalized social problems? Such as choosing to elevate particular voices and require others to avoid certain things? Many women and other minorities are driven from the internet simply due to the overwhelming number of negative to insulting comments that in aggregate act as a serious social force. Mere negative comments are often not harmless when they are selectively applied like how women get lots of questions about things like appearance or domestic things instead of questions related to their profession in a situation contextualized by their profession.
I’ve also seen people make similar arguments when banned for: repeatedly making the same argument after it was refuted, repeatedly making insulting assertions, repeatedly using insulting characterizations while insisting they were merely characterizations and similar things that I don’t see a problem with.
What would your position be on the sorts of things I mentioned above and what concrete functionally useful suggestions might you have? It’s one thing to say that we should simply respond to speech with speech, but it quite another when a lot of the “free speech” rhetoric that is often encountered has to do with controlling a private social space in ways that functionally and realistically deal with how conscious and unconscious bigots actually effect the speech of others right now even when that speech is responded to. While I have good skills when it comes to arguing even I can only keep it up for so long and others have been driven to PTSD and depression. As long as such people can set up their own social spaces I see no problem.
Oops…
That comment was responding to Jennifer on page one. I’m not messing with the editing today.
YouTube isn’t the government, it’s a privately-owned site that has no actual responsibility to offer a platform for unlimited free speech.
It takes down videos and channels for BS “copyright infringement” reasons all the time, because the rights of corporations apparently come before the rights of marginalized people who don’t want to get targeted by neo-Nazis.
Why not get a channel like Evalion taken down? It clearly violates YouTube’s anti-hate speech policy.
It’s not like neo-Nazis can’t hear these views anywhere else on the internet or offline.
“Free speech” whining about sites like YouTube is just that: whining.
I’d worry more about narrowing of free speech laws being used to silence progressives if progressive and left-wing voices weren’t historically already silenced, whether it was legal or not.
From pretty much the beginning, government agencies like the FBI put undercover agents in groups like the Black Panthers to sabotage them from within.
Hell, peaceful protesters get arrested or antagonized by police all the time.
Nobody was worrying about privatization getting in the way of free speech when people got kicked out of a privately-owned shopping mall for wearing anti-war shirts, back before the Iraq War started.
The laws around free speech have a long history of protecting hate speech, not progressive speech, which gets a crackdown whether it’s legal or not.
So no, I’m not worried about YouTube removing a channel for hate speech.
I have a friend who attended Jesuit schools. He lauds that fact and his Irish heritage for his being the most argumentative SOB most people know.
@themousethatsqueeked – Many time David includes tangential tags.
Many bloggers do.
It’s part of driving traffic.
re: pretty much everything else about this post & the one before: I haven’t yet been able to find a GIF that sufficiently conveys the level of “WTF, humanity?” I’ve reached.
ColeYote:
This is why I support him for leader of the New World Order. The dude knows how to get shit done.
@the flouncing mouse
I’m not sure you understand what white knighting is. Not surprising considering gamergaters are apparently incapable of looking up the definitions to simple words like “gamer”, “criticism” “harassment” and “censorship”.
So, do tell, who is the woman that David Futrelle is allegedly white-knighting for?
As a 46 year old who regularly gets asked by callers whether my parents are home, I’m noting for the record that there’s a gender issue around how people perceive that kind of voice. Like, you won’t catch me putting up YouTube videos, I’m going to stick to writing. Why? I’m an adult with a lifetime of qualifications and experiences, dammit, and incidentally, I identify as gender neutral. I don’t really want to deal with people saying ‘but she sounds like a little girl’ whenever I get into anything deep, or cynical, or vulgar. Authority and professional respect? It would be hard for me to get those in a job where I had to appear in person. Think about it guys… The shape of one’s vocal chords have nothing to do with maturity or anything else that counts.
* apologies if someone brought this up already. And in other news, shame on Evalion for being a neoNazi, obviously.
I’m going to agree with a few other people here and just say that YouTube isn’t the only place online to host videos, and people with access to servers and some web design can create their own space on the limitless expanse that is The Internet, so YouTube shutting down channels at their discretion isn’t violating anyone’s freedom of speech.
We see this argument a LOT about people like Anita Sarkeesian disabling her comments section due to harassment. “Anita’s censoring us!” her “critics” will say. “She’s not being fair! She doesn’t want to hear our (rather nasty) opinion of her or her work!”
However, nothing’s stopping them from going other places to spout that opinion. Reddit, twitter, private blogs, etc. still exist and are still open to them and their views. Anita’s just saying “Yeah, I would personally rather not hear what you have to say, thanks.” Which, I feel, should be within her rights to do.
Another thing about this case is that YouTube has rules about not posting hate-speech and the like. While it’s not equally enforced at all (but copyright bullshit is, fancy that) it’s still one of their terms of service, and the ToS must be obeyed if you’re going to use YouTube’s resources, like their servers and their website features.
Imagine you asked me to lend you a pencil, and I agreed, on the condition you didn’t chew on it. I leave the room for a moment, and come back to find you chewing on the pencil I asked you not to chew on.
I would be well within my rights to take my pencil back and ban you from using my pencils again, wouldn’t I? You broke the rule I had put in place for you to use my stuff, therefore you don’t get to use my stuff anymore.
The same thing applies here. YouTube has rules in place for you to use their servers and website features. When you make an account, you’re agreeing to those rules. It’s like a contract. “Party A gets access to Party B’s resources, and in exchange, Party A agrees to these terms of conduct whilst using these resources.”
While YouTube does a shitty job of applying those rules across the board, and while they have some bullshit rules in need of replacement or reconsideration, them’s still the rules, and the rules must be obeyed in order for a user to have access to YouTube’s resources.
@ Dalilama, Wetherby and everyone
Jews, Jesuits and Freemasons, you say? Add Communists and the Vatican and you’ve got the Reverend Doctor Ian Paisley (senior)’s entire worldview.He was an extremely big deal in Northern Ireland until his death a few years ago, and believed some extraordinary stuff, especially about those five sources of all evil.
Maybe nowadays Communism would be called “cultural Marxism” or something: otherwise you could just copy and paste.
You’d think they’d be the most unlikely bedfellows, wouldn’t you?
Ahah, but that’s what we in the international sekrit conspiracy… I mean they, they… just want us to think.
WWTH:
The only thing that surprises me about GarbleGrate anymore is how they still occasionally try to pretend that they aren’t awful people.
Apparently right now a bunch of them are really mad at Patton Oswalt for mocking AVGN’s video on why he isn’t going to review the new Ghostbusters or something. GGers are champing at the bit to spin this as some sort of SJW outrage and also making jokes about Patton’s dead wife. Stay classy.
Moocow
Well, Katie, obviously!
re: all the Jewish conspiracy comments – I grew up in a rather Jewish neighborhood; to the point that we didn’t have classes* in public school on Jewish holidays because at least 40% of the class was absent. I even went to Temple with some of my friends and never once saw anything even vaguely conspiracy-ish! Or even a little bit suspicious.
It’s almost like there isn’t really any conspiracy at all!
*The rest of us still had to go to school, we just spent those days playing hangman on the blackboard, watching filmstrips (ah, the 1960s!), and got an extra recess. Thanks, Jewish kids of my youth, it almost makes up for having to hear all about the great stuff you got for Hanukkah for EIGHT FREAKIN’ DAYS IN A ROW!!/jealous
She would have baked him some more professional looking cupcakes as well. As a deceased dictator, doesn’t he deserve better than the crappy job she did on those?
Blu-ray – so Paisley thought the Jesuits/Vatican were on the same side as the Freemasons? Curiously enough, so did (or does) American pamphleteer and evangelist Jack Chick.
Full disclosure – I was raised Catholic and am now a Mason. Under canon law, that means I am subject to summary excommunication. Really should go down to the diocesan office and get that in writing.
Regarding the OP, I am somewhat surprised to learn that YouTube has standards of any kind.
Regarding ‘secret Jews’, the idea that Jewishness is somehow innate goes back centuries. I read a good history of the Inquisition recently, and it touched on this. Before a certain point, Jewish converts to Christianity were treated like cradle Christians – if they displayed purity of conduct and belief, they were tolerated. After that, they and their descendants were considered tainted and under constant suspicion of ‘Judaizing’ – practicing their old religion in secret. In Spain, the descendants of Muslim converts were under similar scrutiny – something as innocuous as eating couscous in public could result in an investigation. There’s historical accounts of crypto-Jews emigrating to New Spain for greater latitude – so the Inquisition followed.
IIRC, it was after the Reconquista. Jewish people were given the choice to convert to Christianity or leave the country. The Inquisition was formed mostly to keep tabs on the ones who converted – because they told the Spanish what they wanted to hear so that they could keep their homes, but the Spanish were aware of this so they didn’t trust them to keep their word because it was effectively given under duress…
As a bit of trivia though, according to the books I’ve read about the Inquisition and about the witch trials, the mania never took hold in Spain because for all of its flaws, the Inquisition required a higher standard of proof than the witch hunters and ultimately the witch hunters were prosecuted as a threat to the Inquisition’s power.
She is from Canada because there is a park that is in Ontario, Canada that can be seen in one of her videos
David, please start tagging random posts “GamerGate” so GamerGaters will get all excited over their Google Alert going off and run over here, only to find nothing to pile on. This is hilarious.
This, on the other hand, is just disgusting. But not surprising.
@Dalillama
That is amazing!
Now that I think about it, I saw a movie at the San Francisco Film Festival years ago about Jews in Portugal. They had been cut off from the rest of the Jewish people for so long that when they came out of the closet they found out that their way of carrying out some of the rituals had slipped a little over the centuries. So I guess that those particular Portuguese Jews hadn’t been out of the closet for all that long.
At another year at the San Francisco Film Festival, I saw a movie about crypto-Jews in New Mexico. These were people who had heard occasional whispers in their families about them actually being Jews. When they decided to research their families’ history, it was an emotional, liberating process of reclaiming their identity.
I was the one who originally informed Furtelle about this girl. (I have an email exchange with him for poof).
I will say that while leafyishere is flawed, he’s not as bad as Furtelle is making him seem. First, leafy probably only wants her account reactivated so he has more opportunities to mock her. He mocks what he deems cringe worthy, and neo Nazis are both cringe worthy and deserve to be mocked. David Furtelle himself mocks these kinds of people after all.
I will also say while leafyishere has done some undefendable things in the past, he has at least apologized for them. As far as making fun of a bunch of neo-Nazi losers is concerned, I support leafy all the way. Some of them have given leafy DEATH THREATS because of his noble action to help get Evalion brought to justice. Neo Nazis were having a circle jerk around her videos, but after leafy brought attention to it everyone else was downvoting the videos and only upvoting the comments that brought attention to how disgusting she was.
@ pitshade
The Inquisition was the first tribunal in Europe to introduce the ‘presumption of innocence’ and the burden for the prosecution to prove its case. Up until then the best you could hope for (if they didn’t assume guilt) was a ‘neutral’ starting point.
@ Robert,
just as I was writing it, Chick tracts did come to mind. An extreme Protestant crank-magnet thing, perhaps?
Anecdotage again: I had a devoutly Roman Catholic uncle who worked as a printer in the old days of Fleet Street (he’d have started in about 1935 or so). The print unions then were masonic – you couldn’t join them without becoming a mason, and you couldn’t work without joining the union.
He had to go via his parish, then the head of the order which ran the parish, then the bishop, and finally the Cardinal to get the necessary dispensations.
So given that communists and catholics have at various times been forbidden to be masons, and that none of these has always been well-disposed to the Jews, it’s great cover… I mean, it’s pretty odd.
Jennifer,
Thank you for speaking up. I’ve been making the same case every time this comes up, and it’s been a lonely fight. I usually say something like “‘Freedom of speech’ is not a synonym for ‘the 1st amendment to the US constitution’. Freedom of speech is one of the civic virtues of liberal society. The 1st amendment is a law that protects that freedom from one type of interference.”
In this case I do think that YouTube did the right thing by taking down her channel. I don’t think any real harm was done to free speech, and if I should encounter any of these #freespeechfornazicupcakes people, I will defend YouTube by explaining why I think they did the right thing in this case.
What I won’t do is pretend that it’s inherently ridiculous to accuse a corporation of undermining free speech.
The Inquisition in France, amusingly, came under criticism at the time for acquitting most of the people they inquisited, and for refusing to take bribes like a secular court. This was seen as an intolerable impediment to the workings of the machinery of justice as the secular community at the time understood it.
In Baziège, for example, there was a riot because the inquisitors found that some defendents were not actually Cathars after all, and the crowds (who had assembled for a good old-fashioned neighbour burning) refused to accept this verdict.
The other thing about the Inquisition that we forget is that Monty Python were wrong: in Spain it was the absolute rule that the Inquisition would always give you advance warning that they were coming, so you could put your affairs in order. They never arrived unexpected.
Everybody always expected the Inquisition. Their chief weapon was anticipation. Anticipation and clemency. Their two main weapons…
Really? The Inquisition announced they were coming and that worked? Because if some organization known for using some of the worst kinds of torture ever invented by humans told me it was coming, putting my affairs in order would consist of packing up my stuff and leaving town.
You shouldn’t be hesitant to link to Onision. He has admitted he was a giant sh*tbag about what he once thought about transgender people, has publicly apologised and since proven his views are now the complete opposite (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xQQUmi2H_o – this video refutes all transphobic arguments). Really, Onision is one of the most honest and true people on YouTube who supports all the right things, he needs to be promoted, not have his name tarnished any more than it is. He is also very openly and strongly a feminist.
Whereas Leafy, I can DEFINITELY understand the hesitation. A whiny manchild who makes money viciously bullying children and the mentally disabled on the internet is lower than scum.