Youtube needs to crack down much harder on vid eos that promote violent jihad. While the Web site has made some efforts to remove videos that violate its ban on terror promotion, thousands remain.
Indeed, videos that glorify and promote terrorism continue to flood the site; YouTube needs to find a way more consistent and sustained approach, or find itself sucked into an endless game of “whack-a-mole.”
In October, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Queens-Brooklyn) wrote YouTube executives asking them to remove all material featuring Anwar al-Awlaki -- the American-Yemeni cleric fingered as the ideological inspiration of Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber; Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underwear” bomber.
In these cases and many others, the perpetrators apparently “self-radicalized” after viewing Awlaki’s videos, and the videos of other hardliners, online.
In response to Weiner’s letter, YouTube announced that it had pulled hundreds of Awlaki’s more incendiary videos. Yet hundreds more remain -- some in which Awlaki obscures his call for Muslims to kill Americans in pseudo-religious doctrine, and others in which he blatantly expresses his hope that all Muslims will “follow in Nidal Hasan’s heroic footsteps.”
YouTube states that it doesn’t tolerate material that “promotes dangerous or illegal activities,” but it appears that it does not enforce that policy consistently.
It looks like it may also focus too much on the most prominent offenders, such as Awlaki -- seeking to identify a few “bad guys” for close attention, rather than attempting to screen out all videos promoting this violent ideology.
Thus YouTube still hosts many more radicalizing agents just like Awlaki, who fly under the radar because Awlaki has been a lightning rod for attention and anti-terrorism efforts.
For example, there is Jamaican cleric Abdullah al-Faisal, who in 2003 was sentenced in the United Kingdom to seven years in prison as the first person in 100 years to be found guilty of “encouraging others to murder persons unkown.” In a lecture available on YouTube, Faisal calls for Muslims to hate non-Muslims and to “exterminate them.”
Australian cleric Feiz Muhammad is said to be the ideological inspiration behind cases of terrorist activity around the world, including Australia, Singapore and Lebanon. In one lecture on YouTube, he declares that anyone who speaks disrespectfully of Islam should be beheaded.
YouTube serves a valuable role as a forum for the expression of ideas; wholesale censorship of it would be counter to what America stands for. But how blatant does the call for violence need to be before it cracks the threshold of YouTube’s tolerance? Must it wait until someone has been named specifically as the inspiration behind a critical number of terrorist attacks and plots before it acts to remove that person’s material from the site?
In order to responsibly police their site, the managers of YouTube’s content must understand precisely how jihadist ideology justifies and encourages violence, and learn to identify how those justifications are typically expressed. That will allow them to establish clear boundaries between genuine free expression and speech that incites for the cause of killing.
Drawing those lines will spare YouTube the waste of its resources by trying to stamp out one individual at a time, only to watch others pop up. Attacking the heart of the problem is the only way to achieve YouTube’s worthy goal of eliminating content that promotes terrorism.