An attempt to curtail freedom of speech or legitimate complaint?
Germany’s national Jewish body said Thursday it has filed suit against YouTube and its parent company Google, demanding a court order for the site to be permanently purged of anti-Semitic videos.
Stephan Kramer, secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said in Hamburg, “we charge Google with aiding and abetting racial hatred and discrimination on its YouTube video- platform subsidiary.
“We applied this week for an injunction from a court in Hamburg.” He said one example was a video clip that showed a late president of the Central Council, Paul Spiegel, being burned alive. He charged that it had been available for download for months on end.
If there is a video on YouTube showing a man being burned alive, then surely that is beyond the pale and should be removed. Last year the Google company temporarily removed videos of a renowned Egyptian blogger, allegedly because he had uploaded videos showing torture. They were soon reinstated.
The co-founder of YouTube, in Sydney this week, said that he didn’t like the fact that his site sometimes showed extreme violence, but there was nothing he could do to completely eradicate it.
The ZdJ (Central Council of the Jews in Germany) is really one of the most dangerous enemies of free speech in Germany. Their definition of antisemitism is often really wide and this suit against Youtube is, to my eyes, a move which is really endangering the right of free expression. Especially German law provides enough ways to discriminate right-wing activists (i.e. denying the holocaust can be punished with two years in jail. That’s the as much as you can get for owning child porn!). I’m really no friend of nazi ideology, but even right-wing extremists must be granted their human rights, such as free expression.
And then I have to disagree in the “burning man” example: If the man is, for example, an activist burning himself to death to express a message or somebody who gets killed by police forces or military, Youtube should definitely not take the video down!
I was one of the first to protest at Youtube when they took down Wael Abbas account, because it was highly problematical that through their move his journalistic and activism work got sabotaged. I would never view these torture videos myself, but I strongly demand my right to be able to. And that’s what I demand in case of racist / antisemitic videos as well: I don’t want to view them, but I want to be able to. I don’t want to be told what’s right and what’s wrong by some censor.