Germany’s Jewish representative body has filed suite against YouTube and its parent company Google, demanding a court order for the website to be permanently purged of anti-Semitic videos.
“The radical right-wing scene is using YouTube massively as a platform,” said Stephan Kramer, secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, the umbrella body of Germany’s Jewish communities.
“We are accusing Google, with its YouTube video platform subsidiary of being an accomplice to inciting racial hatred and discrimination.”
“We applied this week for an injunction from a court in Hamburg,” he added.
The videos, Kramer claims, include one showing a picture of Paul Spiegel, a deceased former head of the Central Council of Jews, being burned with a swastika in the background.
For months, he claims, the video has been available for download on the site.
A spokesman for Google in Germany, Key Oberbeck, said the company is “very conscientious about its responsibility.”
YouTube’s main line of defense against extremists videos is self-policing by its online community. If users spot an inappropriate video that has been uploaded by one of the service’s millions of users, they can report it with the click of a mouse.
“These complaints are then handled by (YouTube) employees who have been trained to deal with them,” said Oberbeck.
Once a video has been banned, YouTube has technology that can identify it and prevent it from being uploaded again in the future.
But the Central Council of Jews says that is not enough. Kramer would like to see YouTube hire new workers to scan the site’s massive archive to identify and remove extremist content.
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