​“So many illegal people have come in America, but they are taking part in these entire movements. Somebody's paying big money.” - Vibhuti Jha on his YouTube channel, The Jaipur Dialogues USA, on anti-war student protests.

“At some stage the civilized world has to come to the realization that until or otherwise we eradicate Islam this problem will not go away.” - Kalavai Venkat on the PGurus YouTube channel, run by Sree Iyer, on how to end conflict in Israel-Palestine.

Bigoted speech of this kind is rife on a number of Hindu supremacist channels. It clearly violates YouTube’s policy on supremacist speech, and has been flagged by Savera’s researchers to YouTube through its official channels. But YouTube has failed to take action. Now, as Israel’s devastating bombardment of Gaza accelerates, Hindu supremacist YouTubers — led by the likes of Vibhuti Jha and Sree Iyer — have continued to fan the flames, spreading hate speech, disinformation, and even calls for genocide.

YouTube’s inaction has meant that these figures have been given free rein to broadcast a toxic cocktail of Hindu supremacist, white supremacist and anti-Muslim content to the world, including a number of antisemitic claims, Islamophobic conspiracy theories, and Trumpist disinformation about rigged elections, illegal immigrants and leftist conspiracies. These include:

- Jha’s hosting of Yati Narsinghanand, an extremist monk, during which both he repeatedly called for genocide against India’s Muslims. Jha nodded in agreement, arguing that “our youth must be prepared for war,” and called for the military training of Hindu youth.

- Venkat’s anti-Muslim comments on PGurus, quoted above, that also called Islam a “virus of the mind,”

- Jha’s repeated platforming of Robert Spencer, whom the SPLC has described as “one of America’s most prolific and vociferous anti-Muslim propagandists.”

- PGurus regular platforming of Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, who has spread bigoted conspiracy theories and unchecked hate speech, including the Trumpist claim that US elections are “rigged,” and comments that “all these East Coast and West Coast Jews [protesting Israel’s genocide] are lumps of shit.” During the same episode, Iyer spread an Islamophobic conspiracy that Rep. Ilhan Omar has committed “five or six counts of serious fraud,” including “marrying one's own brother.”

Both Jha and Iyer highlight the ways in which far-right ideologies and conspiracy theories from across different supremacist movements have converged. But they also exemplify how this has happened: because of the open platform provided by such figures to the likes of YouTube. Indeed, Jha has even used his YouTube channel to strategize how to bring Indian Americans into the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.

Our community plays a major role in the leadership of social media corporations. Indian Americans also have a long history of solidarity with the civil rights movement and the struggle for a just, multiracial democracy. However, the unwillingness of YouTube — led by you Mr. Mohan, an Indian American — to clampdown on harmful content has allowed a far-right fringe within our community, the Hindu supremacist movement, to grow unchecked. In effect, Indian American leaders in Big Tech have chosen profits and power over an alignment with democratic values at the very moment they are so existentially under attack in India, the United States, and the rest of the world.

Indian Americans have previously called on tech companies to address these harms, in the wake of massive amounts of hateful and false content emerging out of Hindu supremacist troll farms in the early weeks of the devastating violence in Israel-Palestine. Not only has no action been taken in any of these cases, but employees in the US have been further targeted and retaliated against for speaking up on this issue — an unacceptable response. This follows from an earlier pattern of retaliating against workers at YouTube Music who were laid off after unionizing.

Mr. Mohan, you have said that “YouTube’s top priority is living up to our responsibility as a global platform.” Why then are your own policies on supremacist hate speech not enforced against Hindu supremacists? YouTube, if it chooses to, can take action — as it has with white supremacists such as Richard Spencer, Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern and David Duke, the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Mr. Mohan, you must do the same with Hindu supremacist hate speech. Anything less would be a capitulation to the far-right, and an abdication of your responsibility: as an executive, and as an Indian-American.

As Indian Americans, we call on YouTube to:

1. Stop profiting from Hindu supremacist speech by immediately demonetizing and deplatforming Hindu supremacist channels that demonize communities and incite violence.

2. Enforce policies regarding promotion of hate and supremacy against Hindu supremacists, as was done with white supremacist accounts.

3. As demanded by the Alphabet Workers Union:

- Reinstate all terminated workers protesting Project Nimbus;

- Follow the National Labor Relations Bureau’s ruling recognizing Google as a joint-employer for all future negotiations with Cognizant YouTube workforce;

- Reverse the roll back on minimum wage and health care commitments to the subcontracted workforce.

4. As demanded by Change the Terms coalition of more than 200+ civil-society organizations:

- Improve transparency and enable civil-society oversight of enforcement practices by regularly sharing virality and enforcement reports.

- Disclose which AI tools and models your platform uses to recommend and moderate content and the data they are trained on.

- Ensure reliable and affordable access to data tools that researchers and journalists use to study your platforms in a timely manner.