PLANK OCTOBER 5, 2012
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Google, the owner of YouTube, didn’t want to censor the anti-Islamic video that has led to riots and the slaying of four U.S. diplomats in Libya. When the U.S. government asked the company to reconsider hosting the video at all in mid-September, Google declined, saying it didn’t break YouTube’s community guidelines. Only as violence continued in the Middle East did the company reluctantly agree to block the video in Egypt and Libya, figuring lives were at stake.
Well, with no fanfare, a couple days ago Google turned the video back on. “We only restricted access to it in Libya and Egypt on a temporary basis due to the very difficult circumstances there,” a YouTube spokeswoman confirms. “Now that the situation is calmer, we’ve reinstated the versions that had been restricted.”
It may be true that Google always planned for the blockage to be temporary. But Rebecca MacKinnon, a journalist and activist who first discovered that the video had become visible again, thinks it also has to do with the chorus of criticism it faced from human rights and free speech groups for taking the unusual step of voluntarily censoring its own content without being forced to do so by local laws (which is why the video was blocked in in India and Indonesia). By judging situations on a case-by-case basis, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jillian York worries, Google will then have to justify its decisions to all sorts of parties.
I’d much rather see Google stick to one blanket policy, subject only to the variations in country-specific laws, instead of making judgment calls based on difficult-to-interpret circumstances on the ground. Because even if Google does treat all exceptions as temporary, canceling blockages as soon as circumstances return to normal, the initial decision to censor is still what matters. Once Google gives in to the heckler’s veto, there’s no telling what people—and governments—will do to influence the company’s decisions in the future.
4 comments
Free speech does not include the freedom to inciting people to riot. I think it's pretty obvious that video was designed to incite Muslims. So it's sweet that you have such a purists attitude toward censorship. It's too bad that purist attitude enables propagandists to incite others to riot and kill each other. You might want to rethink that part of the equation.
- AllanL5
October 5, 2012 at 3:03pm
AllanL5, The allegedly offensive video did not cause Christians and other infidels to riot. They were the presumed consumers of this anti-Islamic propaganda. It only incited Muslims. Almost anything will cause Muslims to riot when it serves their political purposes. Even a satirical cartoon of a Middle Eastern man with a turban bomb in some obscure Danish newspaper. That's how they silence criticism of Islam. Sounds pretty totalitarian to me. Where do you draw the line on freedom of expression?
- amidut
October 5, 2012 at 4:56pm
Free speech means speech free from government control of any sort. Persons, whether corporate or natural, have no duty to forbear from censoring speech with which they disagree. All of us have limits on what we will allow people to say in our houses, offices, airwaves, whatever. Youtube censors pictures of women's nipples, even if the woman is just breastfeeding an infant. This is silly to my way of thinking, but they are within their rights. It makes a lot more sense for them to censor a stupid lying movie that incites violence. There is no virtue in making this rot available. By contrast, there was courage and virtue in the ACLU's defense of Nazis that wanted to parade on public property. They were defending people, no matter what kind of people, from government restriction of free speech. That is not this.
- Vekert
October 5, 2012 at 5:25pm
I had something brilliant to post. I censored it. Now you will never know what I had to say. Of course, neither do I.
- skahn
April 17, 2013 at 4:31pm