YouTube: Now Terror Free!

Good news for YouTube this week as comScore reported that users watched 5 billion videos in July. Bad news for terrorists as, under pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman, that famous Independent from Connecticut, the Google-owned portal has agreed to ban terrorist training videos from its site.

That means no more instructional videos on throat slashing or how to make an exploding vest or footage of sniper attacks. "Ninja assassin training" and "illegal street racing" are also banned, according to the site's Community Guidelines page. Terrorists hawking their how-tos on YouTube face getting their accounts shut down permanently.

The ban relies on users to flag any videos "intended to incite violence or encourage dangerous, illegal activities." The only problem is, as recent numbers show, that's like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

The company says that hundreds of thousands of videos are uploaded to YouTube every day, according to a May 19 post acknowledging Lieberman's demand. In the same post, the company politely told Lieberman that "YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone's right to express unpopular points of view."

For four months, Lieberman stayed on top of Google, drumming up bipartisan support as well as solidarity from John Whittingdale, a British politician who is chairman of the House of Commons' Culture, Media, and Sport Committee. (Whittingdale has published his own report on the threats of Web-incited violence.)

Lieberman barked down freedom of speech advocates by claiming a ban would curb al Qaeda's activity on the Web.

In a statement Thursday -- the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the day after Google announced the ban -- Lieberman released a statement:

"YouTube was being used by Islamist terrorist organizations to recruit and train followers via the Internet and to incite terrorist attacks around the world, including right here in the United States, and Google should be commended for recognizing that."

He went on to call on Google to remove all terrorist-sponsored videos and not rely on terrorists to follow YouTube's Community Guidelines.

by Andrea Chalupa