YouTube Users Can Now Flag "Terrorist" Videos

[Scott_F]

From the LA Times...

Reporting from Washington — Nudity. Sexual activity. Animal abuse. All are reasons YouTube users can flag a video for removal from the website. Add a new category: promotes terrorism.

YouTube and its parent company, Google, have been criticized by lawmakers for refusing to prescreen militant speeches and propaganda videos that have been cited in more than a dozen terrorism investigations over the last five years.

But rather than submit to policies that many argue would amount to an erosion of 1st Amendment rights, particularly in an open-access environment such as the Internet, YouTube is taking a decidedly more democratic path — let the customers decide.

[articles.latimes.com ]

Senator Joe Lieberman is leading the charge, with New York congressman, Anthony Weiner, not far behind. For some time Lieberman has pushed for YouTube to prescreen videos (please no).

There is the obvious problem of what "promotes terrorism" means. And then one wonders if there is a threshold where YT will yank a video based on "terror flags".

I'm glad to see that YT/Google remains committed to letting the individual users express their evaluations rather than rely on the dictates of a small minority of video cops (i.e. the state).

So excuse me now while I go look for a Dick Cheney video on YT and use the new tool to flag it appropriately.

[john5000]

haha, joe lieberman then, and anthony weiner (hehe, weiner) are the terrorists... they are trying to destroy freedom of speech... silly assembly people (is that what they are called, assemblymen... assembly people... what are they assembling?)

here's what I say... let's promote all videos that "promote terrorism" to the top of the searches... give them the front page, then we can all have a nice good look and point at how it represents that it is infantile and retarded to support anything that is counter to peace and healing and love for all... or something (no offense to infants and retards, or retarded infants)

confession: in my molecular biology class, we described how bio-molecules were "retarded" as they moved through a matrix... and sometimes I giggled.

btw, i don't necessarily subscribe to notions of permanency of intellect-modifying chromosomal "abnormalities"...