Legal Research

Google Walks The Tightrope

There was a great article in the NY Times on Sunday about the challenges Google faces as it becomes the world’s Internet gatekeeper.  It focused especially on YouTube — which is ground zero for Google’s free-speech battle — and noted Google’s attempts to satisfy takedown requests made by countries such as Turkey and Thailand, as well as by prominent individuals such as Senator Joseph Lieberman.

Even though the article is generally positive about Google’s attempts to balance these demands with its desire to promote free speech, Google’s not perfect.  For example, YouTube isn’t transparent when it removes content.  Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin’s video “First, They Came“, which criticized violence perpetrated by Islamic extremists, was taken down for “inappropriate content”.  When she emailed YouTube for an explanation, she got no response:

“Malkin remains dissatisfied with YouTube’s response.  ‘I’m completely flummoxed about what their standards are,’ she said.  ‘The standards need to be clear, they need to be consistent and they need to be more responsive.’ … The removal of Malkin’s video may have been an innocent mistake.  But it serves as a reminder that one person’s principled political protest is another person’s hate speech, and distinguishing between the two in hard cases is a lot to ask of a low-level YouTube reviewer.  In addition, the publicity that attended the removal of Malkin’s video only underscores the fact that in the vast majority of cases in which material is taken down, the decision to do so is never explained or contested.  The video goes down, and that’s the end of it.”

[Note by Dan: The vid was supposed to be available again as of November 30.  Today it's down again, which appears to reinforce the point made above.  Here's another version.]

Vetting content is a 24/7/365 issue.  It’s time-consuming and requires Google to make nuanced judgements.  They’d prefer that individual governments set up national review boards to give them guidance about what content needs to be restricted.  If these governments set standards that are repressive, Google hopes that they “would be resisted by millions of individual users who would agitate against censorship as they experienced the benefits of free speech.”

Riiiiiight.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on December 03, 2008 (boomark / email).