German Jewish group sues Google and YouTube
Bookworm on Mar 21 2008 at 10:26 am | Filed under: Anti-Semitism
Charles Johnson, at Little Green Footballs, frequently notes how often YouTube happily hosts the worst kind of antisemitic garbage, while at the same time shutting down anything that might be perceived as just a little too critical of Islam. He’s not the only one who has noticed this, and a Germany Jewish group has sued Google and YouTube:
Germany’s leading Jewish group has accused Google and YouTube of hosting anti-Semitic content on its globally popular video site. The group alleges the videos incite racial hatred and discrimination.
A Hitler clip on YouTube: The Central Council of Jews claims the video site has become a hotbed of the radical right-wing scene.
The Central Council of Jews in Germany on Thursday requested that a Hamburg court issue a cease-and-desist order against Google for disseminating what it claims are anti-Semitic videos that incite “racial hatred and discrimination” on its YouTube Web site.“The radical right-wing scene is using YouTube, massively, as a platform,” said Stephan Kramer, the general secretary of the Central Council of Jews, the umbrella organization of Germany’s Jewish communities. “We are accusing Google, with its YouTube video platform subsidiary of being an accomplice to inciting racial hatred and discrimination.”
The videos, Kramer claims, include one showing a picture of Paul Spiegel, the deceased former head of the Central Council of Jews, being burned with a swastika in the background. For months, he claims, the video has been available for download on the site.
It’s not the first time such allegations have been made against YouTube. In 2006, films with right-wing extremist messages and other dubious content were found. And in November 2007, despite new filtering software installed by YouTube, the Nazi propaganda film “Jud Süss” (”The Jew Suss”) was found on the site. It is illegal to make Nazi propaganda films like “Jud Süss” or Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” available in Germany without additional commentary about the context in which they were made.
[snip]
YouTube’s main line of defense against extremists videos is self-policing by its online community. If users spot an inappropriate video that has been uploaded by one of the service’s millions of users, they can report it with the click of a mouse. “These complaints are then handled by (YouTube) employees who have been trained to deal with them,” said Oberbeck. Once a video has been banned, YouTube has technology that can identify it and prevent it from being uploaded again in the future.
But the Central Council of Jews says that’s not enough. Kramer would like to see YouTube hire new workers to scan the site’s massive archive to identify and remove extremist content.
I find it interesting that the challenge is to traditional antisemites, in the Hitler mode, rather than to the equally aggressive antisemitism of the Islamists.
Although I’m uncomfortable about having court’s block speech, I think the fact that Google and YouTube take it upon themselves to block offensive content means that they have an obligation to carry out that responsibility efficiently and even-handedly. To the extent that they are failing to do so, legal action is as good a way as any to try to get them to enforce their own rules and practices.
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For those who are interested in “participation”:
http://stop-internet-terrorists.blogspot.com/
http://muninn-quotheraven.blogspot.com/
Charles Johnson, at Little Green Footballs, frequently notes how often YouTube happily hosts the worst kind of antisemitic garbage, while at the same time shutting down anything that might be perceived as just a little too critical of Islam. He’s not the only one who has noticed this, and a Germany Jewish group has sued Google and YouTube:
This is because the Islamic jihad has a bunch of people on the net that go and flag the videos in such greater numbers that Youtube takes it down. The same isn’t true for pro-Jewish coalitions on the net.
But the Central Council of Jews says that’s not enough. Kramer would like to see YouTube hire new workers to scan the site’s massive archive to identify and remove extremist content.
That’s pretty unrealistic. Google and Youtube does not have the manpower, the interest, the economic incentive, nor the legal protections to do that. Asking google to set up filters is suicide for them.
Until Google decides to pick a side in this fight between America and terrorism, they won’t have the same amount of interest in culling jihad videos as we, the people allied with America, have.
I live in NJ. Following 9/11 there were reports all over — TV, Newspapers, etc — about Muslims “dancing in the streets” in Patterson, NJ when the twin towers fell. I was there, I saw it.
Now if you search Google, there is no mention of this. So, according to some, dancing in the streets in Patterson NJ on 9/11 is an urban myth. Google IS editing the news. Why, I don’t know, maybe they did pick a side “between America and terrorism”!
Google only employs a couple of thousand people, perhaps 3k. Depending on who manages these things, it will play out different.
On the concern of the search engine, I believe it is due to the fact that people just don’t put “Palestinians dancing in street” into google. Why? because the media hasn’t barraged them with this phrase like they did “Abu Ghraib”.
How many people have mispelled Abu Ghraib or morphed it into something else? Yet it is still top on google. Why? Because the media made it a public phrase. The media didn’t make it a public phrase about Palestinian mass murderer worship going on in the streets though.
They’ll mention it, in print, but they never attach the psychological tail that they did with Abu Ghraib via the pictures and insinuations.
A lot of Democrats have taken their loyalty to the media and re-directed it towards blogs like Kos and Google as the ultimate purveyors of truth and information.
This, of course, simply makes Americans even more vulnerable to jihad propaganda or disinformation because the internet is disaggregated in a distributed network. Not even Google can create or remove information, they can only make it easier or harder to find. Their motto is to store information and make it easier to access.
Well….no.
This makes “sense” in a country like Germany that has these insane PC laws where you can’t deny the holocaust.
But…if we have any faith in our system, then we should believe that Google has every right to police their political content in a manner consistent with their own political bias.
To clarify…I know that the lawsuit is happening in Germany. I am commenting on the fact that Book seems to be giving the nod to the lawsuit, so I am applying US standards to judging it.
I’m not giving the nod to it, jlibson, in the free speech sense — that is, I’m not saying that this is a censorship question. I’m noting that, to the extent YouTube and Google purport to have terms of use that are meant to shut down inflammatory hate speech, it is acceptable to sue them to enforce their own rules. It would be different, I think, if neither YouTube or Google had set up such rules.
I didn’t know that.
You can sue someone to enforce their own rules?
Yup. At least here you can. (Although here you can sue anyone for anything, depending on the judge.) I’m unclear on German law, of course.