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Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Anti-Semitism Spread by YouTube

Timo Heuer from Germany is 15 years old and writes as freelance journalist for publications like Netzeitung or Readers-Edition.de.

 

YouTube, world’s first place for searching videos, is full of videos denying the Holocaust. One of these videos shows under the headline “Housewitz - Tanzen macht frei” (“Housewitz - Dancing relieves"; Housewitz the style of Auschwitz) one of the frightfulliest concentration camps ever. It goes on with some slogans such as “7,000,000 party people”, “3 Days of non-stopping partying” and “Hot showers (free)”.

But there are also some anti-Semitism videos which want to show us the “reality” of a Jewish world domination. Of course, it’s nonsense. But there are many people with an anti-Semitic background writing comments like these: “great! that’s the simple truth!” or “nice vid mate” and believing it. By the way, the video got favorited 10 times!

Slogans like “Jews invented communism” and “The world trade center incident also a act partly done by jews” also incite the watchers of those videos. The destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11 was a public and very tragic event. That’s taken as a reason to chevy Jewish people, although they hadn’t anything to do with this act. The most scaring thing is a trailer of a game, the goal of which is to kill Jewish and black people.

But what can YouTube do against that kind of videos? Can they have an eye to every uploaded video? No, of course not. I think the community has to (re)act. Of course, the video is flagged, but that’s not enough. They have to build a system for self-deletion or let users flag videos as anti-Semitic, so an employee can check the insult and delete it. Even though they have a warning system, that’s not enough. The first video mentioned is online since last December, the second video since last November... and nothing happened...

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