Philipp Justus, managing director of the German unit of YouTub’s parent company Google, on Monday received a letter from the World Jewish Congress (WJC), demanding he remove illegal material praising Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. In the letter, released by news agencies, WJC Executive Vice President Robert Singer is asking, “Why is it that Google steadfastly refuses to take action against the proliferation of racist and anti-Semitic material on its platforms? Do you really believe that songs glorifying or inciting the mass murder of Jews fall under freedom of speech?”
Singer highlighted one exceptionally revolting song among many nasty numbers, “In Belsen,” by the neo-Nazi group Kommando Freisler, whose members received suspended jail terms in 2009 for inciting racial hatred. According to Singer, the despicable song is “widely available” on YouTube despite its banning in Germany.
In September, the director of the memorial at the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp Jens-Christian Wagner already asked YouTube to remove “In Belsen.” Wagner’s letter received no response, until last Saturday, when Germany’s biggest daily newspaper, Bild, reported it, and then most versions of the song were deleted from YouTube. But dozens of equally hateful Kommando Freisler and other neo-Nazi bands’ songs are still available online in “thousands of clips,” according to WJC spokesman Michael Thaidigsmann.
“It is obvious that Google/YouTube does not seriously deal with this matter, that it lacks any proactive attitude, and that even when offensive posts are being flagged, it is very slow to remove the incriminating files from its service,” Thaidigsmann said, adding bitterly, “If I post something from Adele or Taylor Swift, you can bet it’ll be gone in a few hours.”
A spokesman for YouTube’s German unit told AFP his employers have “clear guidelines to ban hate speech against certain groups or content that incites racial hatred. We remove all videos that violate these guidelines as soon as they are reported. That also applies to banned right-wing extremist music.”
And so it appears the problem lies either with the anti-hate guidelines or with the German YouTube employees who are supposed to follow them.