You likely won’t be seeing Steven Crowder on YouTube for the rest of the year.
The self-described conservative comedian has once again been suspended from YouTube, receiving his second channel strike in recent months from the platform on Wednesday.
According to YouTube’s policy, when a channel receives two strikes within a 90-day period, they “will not be allowed to post content for 2 weeks.” Considering Crowder received his strike on Dec. 15, that means his channel “Louder with Crowder” won’t be able to livestream the broadcast or upload new material until Dec. 30.
When a user receives three strikes within a 90-day period, YouTube permanently terminates the channel from its platform.
Mashable has reached out to Crowder for a statement and will update this piece if we hear back.
Crowder announced the YouTube suspension on his Dec. 15 show, which was streamed on Rumble, a video platform that has become popular with right-wing internet personalities over the past year.
“Last night YouTube sent us the second channel strike,” Crowder stated on the show while showing his viewers the suspension message from YouTube. “So this is going to prevent us from streaming on YouTube for the rest of the year.”
“As usual, they did not provide any details for the suspension,” he continued. “It’s one of those things where we could say, we could guess…I mean, take your pick.”
Crowder also posted a screenshot of the strike notification from YouTube on his Twitter account, which shows that he received the strike for violating the company’s “hate speech policy” in his Dec. 14 livestream show titled “The Left HATES Elon Musk Because He’s TOO Based!” The livestream has since been removed from YouTube.
YouTube provided more details concerning Crowder’s second strike and suspension in a statement to Mashable.
“We have issued a second strike to the StevenCrowder channel for violating our hate speech policy, through repeated targeting of the LGBTQ+ community,” said YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon. “Hate speech is not allowed on YouTube, and we remove content or issue other penalties–such as a strike–when a creator repeatedly targets, insults, and abuses a protected group based on certain attributes, such as sexual orientation or gender identity and expression, across multiple uploads.”
Crowder’s show that day opened up with a music video for a holiday “parody” song about a man who discovers his ex-girlfriend is trans and transitioned after they broke up. Crowder’s comments on transgender people were similar to the segment that earned him his first strike in October, when he made anti-trans statements concerning a since-debunked story that he sourced from an anti-trans group.
The other segment that possibly ran afoul of YouTube’s hate speech policies is a discussion between Crowder and his producers about JK Rowling’s recent tweet.
The Harry Potter author created an uproar earlier this week when she tweeted out criticism of Police Scotland’s decision to log rapists as women if they identify as such, according to Advocate.
Crowder has been suspended a number of times before on YouTube. However, according to the company policy, strikes expire after 90 days. So, Crowder has been very careful to make sure they don’t accumulate over that period of time, avoiding a permanent ban.
The conservative YouTuber has a few weeks in 2022 before that October strike expires. If Crowder breaks YouTube policy again before that, then that’s the end of his 5.5 million subscriber channel.
