Paris (AFP)

The polemist Dieudonné M'Bala's YouTube channel M'Bala, used to the courts and condemned several times for his anti-Semitic statements, was deleted by the streaming giant, we learned on Tuesday from Google France.

The polemist's page, which had around 400,000 subscribers, has disappeared in the past hours after a decision by Google, the parent company of Youtube.

"This deletion follows repeated violations of our YouTube community regulations," said AFP Google France, who recalls that the online video platform "has tightened its regulations on + hate speech + (hate speech, editor's note) in June of last year ", and has just removed several chains of white supremacists in the United States.

The disappearance of the Dieudonne channel was welcomed by the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF), which has reported "dozens of videos" of the polemicist to Youtube in recent months.

"This closure follows the action of the UEJF and its anti-racist partners who have been fighting for years, day by day, the spread of racist, anti-Semitic and negationist ideas of the pseudo humorist", welcomed the organization on Facebook.

"The hundreds of thousands of Dieudonné subscribers are orphaned by their preacher of hate, and that's good," said the president of the UEJF, Noémie Madar, in welcoming a decision that "marks a major breakthrough in the fight against hate on the internet ".

For her, "the other internet players no longer have any excuse, Twitter and Facebook should also take responsibility." Networks on which Dieudonné has 150,000 and 1.2 million subscribers respectively.

The polemicist reacted on Facebook by denouncing "Israeli pressures". The removal of his channel recalls, according to him, "the fireworks of the darkest hours in history".

A regular in the courts, Dieudonné has been condemned several times by the justice system for his hateful remarks. His last conviction was in November: he had been fined 9,000 euros, for complicity in an anti-Semitic insult, after the publication of a video and a song entitled "C'est mon choaaa".

© 2020 AFP