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"According to the YouTube blog today, Senator Joe Lieberman sent a letter explaining his misgivings with the platform for free speech that YouTube has given the public.\u00A0 His primary concerns weren't the usual suspects when you think of the things that American politicians find objectionable (rap music, graphic portrayals of violence, Grand Theft Auto and Janet Jackson's nipple).\nInstead he brought up a topic that YouTube is actually fairly guilty as charged on - allowing themselves to be a willing participant in the dessimenation of Islamic terrorist organizations's propaganda videos:\nYouTube is being used to share videos produced by al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups. The purpose of this letter is to request that Google implement its own policy against this offensive material, remove these videos from YouTube, and prevent them from reappearing [...] Central to this media campaign is the branding of content with an icon or logo to guarantee authenticity that the content was produced by al-Qaeda or allied organizations like al-Qaeda in Iraq, Ansar al-Islam (a.k.a Ansar al-Sunnah) or al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb. All of these groups have been designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) by the Department of State.\nYouTube tries to go with the standard excuses:\nFirst, some background: hundreds of thousands of videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. Because it is not possible to pre-screen this much content, we have developed an innovative and reliable community policing system that involves our users in helping us enforce YouTube's standards. Millions of users report potential violations of our Community Guidelines by selecting the \"Flag\" link while watching videos.\nIn Lieberman's letter, we learn that he and his staff identified numerous videos that should, in theory, be a violation of YouTube's Community Guidelines (promoting hate-speech and violence against others, or even depicting 'gratuitous violence'). The videos were not in fact cited by YouTube, but YouTube claims that they were not in violation of the terms of service, and did not contain any violent or hate speech content.\nThe fact remains that the videos are there to promote the organization, and those organizations regularly organize the killings of innocent humans, in Iraq and elsewhere.\nMeanwhile, YouTube is capricous and arbitrary about content that they'll take down that they do deem as promoting hate speech, objectionable, or promoting of violence, and what they don't.\u00A0 Let's go down the list, shall we?\nMichelle Malkin: Censored for promoting hate speech, when she created a music montage showing victims of Muslim terrorist attacks in response to the Muhammed riots.BumFights: Uncensored. Videos of actual homeless folks paid in sandwiches for beating the crap out of one another.Handsome Hong Kong Guy Censored for showing videos of clothed local females with derogatory towards women music in the background.This Pornography Advertisement Uncensored. It doesn't show actual nudity or sex acts.A Breast-Feeding Mother Censored over obscenity claims.This Strip Tease Uncensored. A small area over the genitals remains covered for the duration of the minute and a half long strip tease.An Egyptian Fellow Censored (then uncensored) for showing video evidence of local police brutality.This GTA IV Ad Uncensored, despite depicting a police officer firing a gun into a crowd of civilians.\nI could wrap this up into a tidy little package for everyone, and take a few paragraphs enumerating further hypocrisy and further defending Senator Lieberman.\u00A0 I hope I don't need to do that, as the moving pictures here should speak volumes.\nPromoting terrorism is inexcusable.\u00A0 If YouTube can spend millions enforcing DMCA and piracy concerns, they can take a few minutes and respond to valid citizen complaints against usage of the system to promote terrorist organizations.\nIt's either that, or face more something a lot more serious than a billion dollar lawsuit from an angry competitor - government regulation."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/05/19/joe-lieberman-youtube/>