When you hear the name YouTube, what pops into your mind? For my kids, it’s videos with online stars I’ve never heard of talking about things I don’t understand. For many of us, it’s fun or interesting clips or – a favourite of mine – obscure 1980s TV shows.
But for others, YouTube is something very different. It is an essential tool in recruiting followers to their extremist views – followers who, the posters hope, will be fuelled with rage against the evil Jews and, the ultimate prize, will go on to kill in the name of their beliefs.
If I owned YouTube, I would spend as much of my time as was needed finding ways to root out this extremism from my site. I would consider the entire site poisoned by its presence. I would be wracked with guilty conscience if there was even a hint that any videos I had published had played some role – any role – in terrorism.
But I don’t own YouTube. Google does. And the evidence is that Google not only has no guilty conscience, but that – quite the opposite – it knowingly and actively publishes such videos. Far from being ashamed of them or wanting to prevent their airing, they are keen to see them thrive on the site. And if people are murdered as a result, so what?
This week’s JC expose is devastating (do read the whole story; it is truly shocking) because it shows that YouTube’s failure to tackle the hate videos that permeate the platform is not a sin of omission but one of commission. It has not overlooked the issue; the videos have not slipped through the net; it is not overwhelmed and so unable to cope with the need to act. Rather, in full knowledge that these videos will – as its own moderators repeatedly told the site – likely lead to deaths, YouTube has decided that they should be kept up and that no action should be taken. They have actively stopped moderators from removing hate videos.
But damning as this evidence is, it should not surprise anyone because it is part of a pattern. Last June, the JC revealed that YouTube was hosting antisemitic content in Urdu, designed to stoke hatred of Jews among British Pakistanis. One of the broadcasters, Zaid Hamid, said in a video viewed hundreds of thousands of times: “Hitler was an angel, the way he took action against Jews, the way he killed Jews”. Imran Riaz Khan, a Pakistani television personality with 1.6 million followers, said in another video: “[The Jews] lobby a lot in America and have strangled America, have it totally controlled. They do it in Europe and America and elsewhere.” Another prominent YouTuber, Makhdoom Shahab-ud-Din, who has 610,000 subscribers, said: “When you criticise Zionism, then Jews come together and start attacking.” There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to such antisemitic hatred.
On three separate occasions over the past year, the JC has highlighted such content on its front page. On each occasion we contacted YouTube and asked for a comment. Not once did anyone from the platform return any of our calls and emails. They treated us, and our revelations, with utter contempt.
This week, when they discovered we had a whistleblower who had provided us with proof that they were actively choosing to host hate videos which incited murder, their response was different. After all, it was no longer just a bunch of Jews moaning about people trying to kill them – it was now a story with legs. So this time, they did indeed respond – by attempting to kill the story. I understand that calls were placed by YouTube to the highest echelons of government to seek to dampen the political response. Quite rightly, those calls were ignored. Surprisingly, the video giant eventually provided us with a statement – a risible, pathetic, deeply unsatisfactory statement, but a statement for the first time nonetheless.
This is a story of a familiar theme: untrammelled Big Tech power. It is a story of the arrogance of companies so large and powerful that they operate outside anything resembling the usual norms, such that they have no qualms about making money from promoting murder. And it has to stop.
I have one suggestion. We speak of fines as if these would have an impact. They would not. Anna Karenina learned that decisions have consequences, and the Big Tech titans who take these decisions need to be held responsible for theirs.
YouTube’s owners – Google - and those who take these decisions should, when appropriate, be treated as accessories to murder. That is what they are, and that is how they should be treated.
