Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes banned from YouTube

The YouTube account of Vice co-founder and Proud Boys creator Gavin McInnes has been banned from the platform for copyright infringement.

It is the latest social media platform to ban McInnes, who left Vice in 2008 and founded the far-right group Proud Boys in 2016. The organisation, which calls its members “Western chauvinists”, admits only male members and promotes political violence.

Last month, it was reported that McInnes had quit Proud Boys. 

In an internal report, published in November by the Clark County Sheriff’s office in Vancouver, Washington, the organisation is described as an “extremist group with ties to white nationalists”.

In August, Twitter suspended McInnes’s account, shortly followed by Facebook in October. Both platforms cited hate group reasons.

Other platforms and websites he is banned from include Instagram, Amazon and PayPal.

McInnes’s YouTube page, which had more than 200,000 subscribers, now displays a simple red banner with the message: “This account has been terminated because we received multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement regarding material the user posted.”

McInnes told news and culture website Insider that in banning him, YouTube had cited a “random video from almost ten years ago”. He said the video in question was the “dos and don’ts of public urination”, which he told the publication was a “really old comedy sketch” he did for shoe company Vans. According to McInnes, the rights of the video were his.

According to YouTube’s copyright policy, a user who has been accused of copyright infringement may submit a counter-notification under the argument that the video in question was “misidentified as infringing or qualifies as a potential fair use”.