The British government has bad news for extremists and the Qaeda-curious: It might get a tiny bit less convenient for you to access videos of your favorite jihadi media.
The Daily Telegraph is reporting that YouTube has begun removing videos featuring the extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki following complaints from the British government to the White House about the content. The complaints arose after British police discovered that Roshonara Choudhry, a British student who recently stabbed a Member of Parliament “to get revenge for the people of Iraq,” had viewed videos of Awlaki via the internet.
Britain’s Pauline Neville-Jones visited the United States last week to press the case, meeting with White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan and the FBI. “Many of these websites are hosted in the US and we want to work closely with you to find ways of preventing such hateful material acting as a recruiting sergeant for men of violence out to harm our citizens,” she said in remarks at the Brookings Institution.
Citing YouTube’s guidelines against videos depicting bomb-making, violence and hate speech, a spokesman recently told the BBC “We have removed a significant number of videos under these policies. We’re now looking into the new videos that have been raised with us and will remove all those which break our rules.” The Telegraph reports that a number of videos containing Awlaki’s famous “44 Ways to Support Jihad” have been removed. However, several videos containing Awlaki’s sermons are still available at the moment, including those of his influential lecture “Constants on the Path of Jihad” — as well as videos from al-Qaeda.
But even if YouTube could effectively remove jihadi material from its site, its absence is unlikely to make a dent in the radicalization of potential terrorists because of the wide variety of different hosting options and multiple legal regimes governing them. Other online video sites still host extremist videos. The Taliban has an official YouTube channel, now largely dormant, and has since created an online video page on its own website. In the absence of online video, jihadi materials are also available — albeit after a slightly longer wait — on several file hosting sites, where many of them are first published.
And failing that, jihadi wannabes can still find such content via counterterrorism research sites. The most recent issue of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s America-focused Inspire magazine actually warned readers to stay away from jihadi websites and visit terrorist research sites such as the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and SITE Intelligence Group to find al-Qaeda material and avoid attracting the attention of intelligence agencies.
YouTube stepping up enforcement of its policies against extremist content isn’t a bad thing. But policymakers in the United States and Britain should be clear about what this will achieve and what it won’t. Limiting videos from al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers on the most popular online video site simply means placing it just a few inches off prime shelf space — not taking it off the internet entirely. Moreover, trying to erase extremist material from the internet entirely is a losing battle. Ultimately, Britain and America would be better off addressing the content of jihadi media with similar urgency to its distribution.
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