What we might lose from YouTube to GooTube

Here is a more blatantly political example: The radical right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin posted a slideshow video she had spliced together from images of the consequences of violence by Muslim extremists.

For some reason, the editors at YouTube judged it to be “inappropriate.” When Malkin asked YouTube officials to explain the inappropriateness of the video – especially in light of the fact that YouTube is full of clips that seem to glorify violence against American troops, she got no response.

Malkin started a conservative YouTube group to protest the removal, and soon that group was tagged for having “inappropriate” content.

The Malkin saga is troubling and revealing on a number of levels. First, one of the best things about YouTube is that it does use its members to police its content. That means that a virtual community enforces community standards. However, YouTube has no mechanism to debate and work through what those standards should be.

Current YouTube policies make sure that sexually explicit content rarely comes up in a YouTube search. And that’s nice. YouTube is one of the few places on the Web that people don’t get naked on your computer screen.

But such broad policies pretty much invite flame and flag wars, through which competing political activists will flag the other sides’ videos as “inappropriate.” That seems to be happening in the wake of the Malkin controversy.

Now, I have watched Malkin’s video that was removed from YouTube on a competing site. It’s pretty dumb and simplistic. It’s just images of those who have been targeted by violent extremists spliced with some of the controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammed. If the dumb and simplistic were considered “inappropriate” for YouTube, there would be about a dozen videos up there.

In her writing Malkin recklessly associates the deeds of a handful of marginal murderous thugs with the sincere and humane faith of more than a billion followers. She has no problem spreading bigotry. She does that on her blog (to which Google’s Web search links) and her books (which Google offers on Google Book Search).

But that does not mean that this particular video is bigoted. It’s not. But it’s by Malkin. So it’s a target. That’s not a good policy. It’s author-based editing rather than content-based.

The Web should always be the sort of place where you can find troubling and challenging material. It should be the source of stuff too out-there for the mainstream media.

YouTube is not the World Wide Web. And it’s not the government. So it has no obligation to present everything or protect anything. But as it folds itself into the oligopoly known as Google – which increasingly filters the Web for us — we should pressure it to be more inclusive and less sensitive.

So here is my great hope for the Google-YouTube deal: I hope that Google’s boldness and tolerance immediately changes the culture of YouTube. I hope that the YouTube editors grow more confident and less fearful about what they can contribute to the culture of the Web. Meanwhile, it’s up to us to pressure YouTube and Google to keep the Web crazy, fun, and even a little scary.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is an associate professor of Culture and Communication at New York University. His latest book is The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004). Siva blogs at Sivacracy.net.

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