May 19, 2008: YouTube Refuses Senator’s Request to Suppress Videos

YouTube logo. [Source: YouTube.com]Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, asks Google, the parent company of the online video-sharing site YouTube, to “immediately remove content produced by Islamist terrorist organizations” from YouTube and prevent similar content from reappearing. The company refuses Lieberman’s request. Lieberman writes a letter to Eric Schmidt, the CEO and chairman of Google, saying in part that YouTube “unwittingly, permits Islamist terrorist groups to maintain an active, pervasive and amplified voice despite military setbacks or successful operations by the law enforcement and intelligence communities.” Lieberman also asks that Google identify changes it plans to make in YouTube’s community guidelines and delineate exactly what it will do to enforce those guidelines. Lieberman says removing such content ought to be “a straightforward task since so many of the Islamist terrorist organizations brand their material with logos or icons identifying their provenance.” However, YouTube responds by saying that taking such actions is not as simple as Lieberman believes, and refuses to remove any videos from anyone without consideration as to whether the videos are legal, nonviolent, or non-hate speech videos. “While we respect and understand his views, YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view,” the company says. YouTube has removed a few videos that Lieberman identified last week after determining that the individual videos violated the company’s community guidelines. However, “most of the videos, which did not contain violent or hate speech content, were not removed because they do not violate our Community Guidelines,” the company says. Lieberman’s committee recently released a report that indicated some Islamist terrorist groups used Internet chat rooms, message boards, and Web sites to help recruit and indoctrinate members, and to communicate with one another. Some critics have said that the committee’s report unfairly singles out Muslims as possible extremists. Additionally, civil libertarians and privacy activists speak out against what they see as Lieberman’s attempt to restrain freedom of speech. John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology says that Lieberman’s request is a practical impossibility; worse, to have sites such as YouTube pre-screen content would radically change how the Internet is used, he says. “The government can’t get involved in suppressing videos if the content is not illegal.” [Federal Computer Weekly, 5/19/2008; US Senate, 5/19/2008; YouTube, 5/19/2008]