Nazi YouTuber turned to secret codes to to avoid detection and content bans online

A British neo-Nazi YouTuber who used codewords instead of extremist terms to dodge content filters powered by artificial intelligence has now been banned from YouTube.

YouTube responded by banning James Owens, 37, following a report by The Times which exposed and the methods he used to attack Jewish people, black people, transgender people, and more.

The Staffordshire man used the word 'uncle' to refer to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, 'people who look white but aren’t' for Jews, and 'basketball Americans' instead of 'African-Americans' in his videos.

Wachiwit / Alamy Stock Photo

The use of codewords and euphemisms is a tried-and-tested method to get extremist content around content moderation tools on the Internet. The technique is widely used by the far right movement in the US.

According to The Times, Owens used his account to recruit new people to join for the far-right movement Patriotic Alternative, founded by fellow British Nazi enthusiast Mark Collett.

Owens revealed to The Times that he had 'red-pilled' several people, using a term that references The Matrix and essentially means opening one's eyes to the truth. "I’m very proud of that," he added.

He told The Times: "I use YouTube to communicate with, entertain, and hopefully lift the spirits of other non-compliant white people, by which I mean white people who reject the psychological abuse, dispossession and humiliation of the present, anti-white order."

But the now-banned YouTuber also claimed to 'reject the concept of ‘racism'.

"It’s simply an anti-white libel, and a weapon of mass psychological abuse devised and wielded to keep white people from thinking and acting in our own interests while our sovereignty and our homelands are taken from us," he told The Times.

Red Flare, a collective of researchers that monitors the far right movement and extremists, have dubbed Owens as 'Britain’s most racist YouTuber'.

"The degree of vitriol, malice, the kind of incandescent rage with which he speaks about ethnic minorities, gay people, Jews, the left, is unique among his peers," said spokesperson for the group, as per The Guardian.

But he has now been unmasked, despite his attempts to hide by using the codename 'the Ayatollah', using a fake profile picture, and weird accent in his videos.

A YouTube spokesperson revealed that his channel has now been reviewed and closed down for violating the platform's hate speech policy.

"After review, we quickly terminated [his] channel for repeated violations of our hate speech policy, which strictly prohibits content that promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on certain attributes."

The spokesperson added, as per The Guardian: "We enforce this policy rigorously and removed over 95,000 videos for violating our hate speech policy in the first three months of 2022."