Gavin McInnes, founder of right-wing fraternity the Proud Boys, was banned from YouTube on Monday as the website became the latest major social media platform to suspend him.
A visit to McInnes channel or any of his videos shows a suspension banner message explaining that the account has been dropped following multiple “third party notifications of copyright infringement.” Before his ban McInnes had over 220,000 subscribers.
The move comes just days after McInnes lost his job as a host at internet-based conservative network CRTV on Dec. 8, following its merger with conservative pundit Glenn Beck’s Blaze TV.
In an email to Business Insider, the Proud Boy founder said that he had been banned from YouTube over a “random video from almost ten years ago”—specifically, a promo for Vans from 2011 called “dos and don’ts of public urination.”
The video was a collaboration between the skateboarding apparel company and McInnes’ advertising firm Rooster. McInnes insists that the rights to the video were his.
“When a copyright holder notifies us of a video that infringes on their copyright, we act quickly to remove content as is required of us by law. We terminate the accounts of repeat offenders,” a YouTube spokesperson told the Daily Dot.
In further comments made to reporters following the Youtube news, McInnes described the move as “part of a concerted effort to completely deplatform” him.
McInnes was banned from Twitter in August then Facebook and Instagram in October, after it emerged the Proud Boys were under investigation for a violent incident in New York.
Facebook said at the time that Proud Boy affiliated pages were in violation of the company’s hate speech policies. The group came under increased scrutiny over its growing association with white nationalism, an allegation McInnes always refuted, and for its propensity for violence.
McInnes quit the group on Nov. 21, a day after now-refuted reports that the FBI had labeled the Proud Boys an extremist organization. In a video uploaded to his YouTube channel, McInnes said that he had done so to ease the legal problems that some of the members were facing.
Since then, however, his own problems have seemed to worsen.
