The past two weeks have seen far-right YouTubers placed under the microscope, with police investigating one and another suspended from his job, Marc Daalder reports
For years, Christchurch-based far-right extremist Lee Williams has uploaded videos rife with racism and conspiracy theories without consequence. In a matter of days, in May, that all came crashing down.
Williams runs the CrossTheRubicon YouTube channel, where he has referenced the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which posits that Jewish elites are flooding Western countries with non-white migrants for nefarious purposes. After the March 15 terror attack, Williams was visited twice by police, ostensibly over his posts.
More recently, he has taken to denouncing the results of the United States Presidential election and an "unholy alliance" between "Marxists and political Islam".
But it wasn't until he targeted Te Paati Māori MPs in a series of videos, attacking them for their support of the He Puapua report, that many people took notice. In one, he says co-leader Rawiri Waititi "can't wait to get his hands in the money pot - the coffers of New Zealand".
Williams' videos provoked outrage on other social media platforms and were mass-reported. Some were taken down. On May 20, a Change.org petition was started calling for Williams' employer, Synlait, to review his contract.
That petition was endorsed by Ta Paati Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. The next day, Williams reported on YouTube that he had been suspended, pending an investigation.
"We are deeply concerned that someone has these views. Lee Williams' views are his own. These views are not shared or held by Synlait," a spokesperson said at the time.
The suspension of Williams sent waves through New Zealand's small but closely-knit far-right YouTube community. One user produced a video calling for a race war and genocide against Māori, describing for more than eight minutes in lurid detail his imagined wave of violence.
That video remained online for 20 hours, Waititi later said. The Department of Internal Affairs said it worked with YouTube to take the video down, and the user's channel was banned. It also referred the video to the Chief Censor to determine whether it was objectionable.
However, Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer have since filed a complaint with the Independent Police Conduct Authority, saying that while police had visited the user, they had taken no further action.
"They made two arrests in terms of the person who's threatened Simeon Brown. This one here has gone onto a watchlist, but because he has mental health issues, he doesn't seem to pose a threat," Waititi told Newsroom on Wednesday.
"For Christ's sake, if that were the Mongrel Mob who came out and did that, or Black Power or anybody else came out and did a video like that, they would have the full force of the law on them."
A police spokesperson said, "We are taking this matter very seriously and have been actively investigating the video since the initial complaints were received last week, including conducting a search warrant".
Ngarewa-Packer later said they were told by the Security Intelligence Service that the individual had been put on a watchlist.
This user was already known to police before the May video, after previous comments he had left on a Lee Williams video in March had endorsed violence against journalists. These comments were flagged with police, who said they would keep an eye on the individual.
Meanwhile, Williams has struggled to keep his channel going in the face of increased scrutiny. He has deleted the vast bulk of the videos from his channel after receiving a two week ban. The ban came after Newsroom asked YouTube why some videos, which appeared to conflict with its community standards, had been approved to remain online by the company.
A YouTube spokesperson said the company takes "the safety of our users very seriously and have strict policies that prohibit hate and harassment on YouTube, including content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups. Any flagged content found to violate our policies is removed from YouTube immediately."
One of the videos which Newsroom asked about was removed for violating the company's hate speech policies. In it, Williams said, "This is one big giant conspiracy driven by the United Nations globalists to fill the west with Islam because Islam is a very aggressive ideology and it is not absolutely not the religion of peace like George Bush once said, that is the polar opposite of the truth. But yeah, [Jacinda Ardern] wants to bring them in and these people when they come in- I'm not saying all of them- but there's going to be a large minority who are going to be supportive of terrorism."
Other videos where Williams endorsed the Great Replacement conspiracy theory by saying, for example, that globalist elites "want to fill Western democracies with them third-world migrants and especially from those Islamic countries," remain online.
