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Video-sharing hate groups |
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Written by Jonathan Drew, asap
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Monday, 30 April 2007 |
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White supremacists and other hate groups have a potent new tool for spreading their message: Internet video-sharing sites.
Inexpensiveness, ease of use and ability to reach a huge young audience are among the reasons the groups are turning to YouTube and Google Video, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In an article released Thursday, the center’s Intelligence Report said it found 12,000 white supremacist propaganda clips in mid-January through a keyword search of Google Video, YouTube and Flickr. Examples include video of a heavy metal concert where skinheads moshed and waved Nazi flags that had been viewed 40,000 times and another video titled “Skinhead,” watched 132,000 times.
One clip filmed at a rally by the National Socialist Movement shows men wearing swastikas on their arm, speaking against immigration from a lectern and making Nazi hand gestures. A YouTube search using the group’s name as a keyword produces 71 results, many of them clips shot at rallies.
“It’s a very worrying phenomenon. They’re spreading like kudzu,” said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence project at the SPLC.
Potok said mainstream video sharing sites have policies prohibiting hate speech but that it’s difficult for them to police the thousands of videos uploaded each day. For example, YouTube threatens to bar users who employ “hate speech which contains slurs or the malicious use of stereotypes.”
The site relies on users to flag inappropriate content, which it reviews and removes if it’s improper, YouTube said in a statement.
Below are excerpts from an interview with Potok.
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asap: Who is the audience for this? Is it more for attracting new members or galvanizing existing ones?
Potok: Largely YouTube is used to bring new people, especially young people, into the movement. Certainly there are people who view these videos who are already very much part of the white supremacist world. But when you really look at the videos, most are made in some kind of attempt to draw new people in. Hate groups are particularly aware of how young the YouTube audience is. And that is very appealing to them because in their minds they need to reach people before they are quote-un-quote brainwashed when they get to college.
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asap: What makes posting a video on the Internet more attractive or easier to do than passing out literature, mailing or making phone calls?
Potok: It’s easier to get to, it’s more in line with what young people expect these days, it’s fast moving and it has a kind of intimate hand-held quality. To find a pamphlet under your windshield wiper in the supermarket parking lot is not a terribly inspiring thing. Even if the pamphlet is calling you to defend the white race and so on. Somehow when that message is put into a video format, delivered by a guy with a swastika on his sleeve, Sieg Heil-ing at the sky, it comes off better in the minds of some kids.
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asap: The report makes the interesting point that video editing allows white supremacists to create false impressions. What are some examples of that?
Potok: It’s remarkable. The reality of most neo-Nazi and Klan demonstrations is that you’ll typically have half a dozen people marching in a small circle surrounded by a hundred police officers, who are in turn surrounded by 300 or 400 anti-racist protesters. Some of the people who are posting on YouTube have created videos that very cleverly present precisely the opposite impression. They are cut in such a way that you think there are hundreds of Nazis, not 10 or 15 and that there is no opposition at all. That the crowds around them are enthusiastically supporting them. And of course that’s universally false. It never happens.
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asap: Mainstream video sharing sites have policies against hate speech. What about this medium makes it difficult for them stamp these videos out?
Potok: There are a tremendous number of videos going up on these sites every single day. Something on the order of 65,000 videos on YouTube alone. It is just impossible as practical matter for any company to patrol so much territory. Their reliance is on customers complaining. YouTube has been quite decent about this. If one goes and points out to YouTube that a particular video violates their policy, they will take it down. But in a venue with millions and millions of videos, it’s virtually impossible to keep ahead of.
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asap reporter Jonathan Drew is based in New York. | Only registered users can write comments.
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