YouTube gets proactive against terrorism clips

by Stevie Smith - Sep 15 2008, 11:35

Usually lambasted for not clamping down on the illegal posting of copyrighted clips by its online membership, video-sharing service YouTube has this week launched a distinctly proactive campaign to rid itself of video clips that encourage terrorist activities, showcase terrorist training camps, and even show how to construct explosives.

Rather than use a specific filtering system, which would have to plough through more than 13 hours of newly posted clips every two or three minutes, Google-owned YouTube is instead looking toward its sprawling user base to immediately report any potential terrorism clips they might happen upon.

To better inform users as what to keep an eye out for, YouTube has posted a list of new policies and community guidelines, which also cover objectionable videos that encourage others to commit acts of violence or show gruesome attacks and graphic acts of war.

While YouTube and other similar video-sharing sites are known to be targets of those looking to spread propaganda and encourage recruitment through terrorist-sponsored clips, AP reports that largely unregulated chat rooms are considered a particularly rich vein of exposure and potential success.

“It’s good news if there are less of these [clips] on the Web,” commented FBI spokesman Richard Kolko. “But many of these jihadist videos appear on different Web sites around the world, and any time there is investigative or intelligence value we actively pursue it.”

Not strictly limited to YouTube’s pages, researchers looking into the proliferation of terrorist clips across the Internet report that online videos exist showing how to correctly cut a person’s throat, how to make homemade bombs, and even how to fashion a deadly suicide vest.

However, despite YouTube’s best efforts to reduce the number of terrorist clips posted to its pages, John Morris, an Internet free speech expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology, doesn’t believe the video-sharing site’s campaign will have a significant effect on the overall availability and spread of such material.

“It’s going to do nothing to take these [terrorist] videos off the Internet,” commented Morris.

Not following that line of thought, Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, believes the U.S. private sector can play a vital role in the fight against terrorism.

In May of this year, Lieberman wrote to Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt saying that Google's actions "will make a singularly important contribution to this national effort."

Around the Web