(Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

The struggle to stop online hate speech was on full display today when a YouTube livestream of a Congressional hearing turned into a hotbed for racist and anti-Semitic comments.

The House Judiciary Committee today held a hearing on how social media companies can stop the spread of white nationalism propaganda. However, the YouTube livestream of the hearing was quickly flooded with hateful comments.

Within an hour of the hearing, YouTube decided to pull the plug on the comment section. "Hate speech has no place on YouTube," the Google-owned service said in a tweet. "We've invested heavily in teams and technology dedicated to removing hateful comments/videos. Due to the presence of hateful comments, we disabled comments on the livestream of today's House Judiciary Committee hearing."

Journalists were quick to point out that a YouTube channel run by white nationalists continued to live stream the hearing with comments turned off and raise money from viewers.

Today's hearing was held amid accusations that social media platforms, such as YouTube, are doing too little to stop white nationalist ideologies. Facebook, for instance, struggled to stamp out video clips of last month's mosque shooting in New Zealand, which the attacker initially livestreamed on the social network.

"These platforms are utilized as conduits to spread vitriolic hate messages into every home and country," said US Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), in his prepared remarks. "Efforts by media companies to counter this surge have fallen short."

In a bit of irony, a Google official spoke at today's hearing about YouTube's efforts to stop racist videos. The company's public policy counsel Alexandria Walden said the platform has been using AI-powered algorithms and human experts to detect and quickly remove videos containing hate speech. However, the content can be difficult to tackle, she added.

"Often times in this space, we have found that content can sit in a gray area that comes up right against the line and may be offensive, but does not directly violate YouTube's policies against incitement to violence and hate speech," Walden said in her written testimony.

"When this occurs, we have built a policy to drastically reduce a video's visibility by making it ineligible for ads, removing its comments, and excluding it from our recommendation system," she added.

Other lawmakers at today's hearing were concerned the video takedowns risked censoring certain political views. "What we are seeing across the world today is that it's a very slippery slope between banning hate speech and banning speech we just hate," said Tom McClintock (R-Calif.). "We've seen many examples even in our own country of legitimate speech being suppressed on college campuses, on social media platforms."