Friends, it’s been a very busy few days for major stories from this blog. Another one this morning. A few days ago, Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s deputy foreign minister (gag reflex) met with two senior executives from Google’s YouTube division. After the meeting, her office released a totally false statement to the press claiming Google had agreed to form a task force with the ministry to censor videos which “incited” Palestinian violence against Israel:
After a misleading press release suggested they’d bowed to pressure from apartheid Israeli officials, Google representatives denied that they agreed to allow censorship of Palestinian videos on YouTube and other Google websites.
…After the agreement was widely reported in the media, a Google representative issued the following statement:
“Following media reports about a meeting last week between Google / YouTube executives and the Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, we wanted to clarify that this meeting was one of many that we have with policymakers from different countries to explain our policies on controversial content, flagging and removals.
The Israeli Ministry for Foreign Affairs has corrected its original announcement which, in error, suggested there had been an agreement with Google to establish ‘a mechanism to monitor online materials.’”
Given how long I’ve been doing this, and how familiar I am with the ways and psychology of Israel’s rightist political leadership, I smelled a rat in the reporting of the meeting and supposed agreement. I wrote this post and proceeded to contact the two Google executives and the company’s press office.
In my e mails to them, I noted that the media both in Israel and in the American Jewish right-wing press reported about the creation of the alleged task force, but the foreign ministry’s own statement omitted this claim. I guessed that it put out an original release including the claim and then thought better of it and removed it. Meanwhile, it was able to both put pressure on Google to censor videos and tell Google, should it need to, that it hadn’t made the overreaching statement.
Here’s the e-mail I wrote to Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s CEO on November 26th:
The Israeli government has released this report (which I translated) of your meeting with deputy foreign minister Tzipi Hotovely. I am a journalist and blogger who writes about freedom of speech and Israeli democracy. If this account published in Maariv is correct, I have numerous concerns and questions about just what was agreed during this meeting. If you have not done so, can you release your own characterization of what happened at this meeting and what was agreed?
Will Google, as a result of this meeting, be removing videos deemed to incite violence against Israel? And if so, what criteria will be used to determine what is removed? Will there be increased collaboration between Google and the foreign ministry? And if so, what form will this take? What subjects will be studied and what actions are contemplated, if any?
“MK Tzipi Hotovely: Terror by Children Arises from Incitement on the Internet
Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely met with the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki and Jennifer [sic] Downs, director of public policy, at Google’s Silicon Valley offices.
Hotovely received a comprehensive review of the company’s apparatus for monitoring videos which incite violence. In the meeting, she raised the problem of incitement on the internet, which drives young children to go out and stab people:
‘The daily terror attacks in Israel are the result of youths and children incited starting with the educational system to proceeding to social networks. This is a daily war against incitement that cannot be conducted without the collaboration of these social networks.’
At the end of the meeting, it was agreed that Google would strengthen bilateral relations with the Foreign Ministry and build a collaborative work apparatus to monitor the distribution of this inciting material on the internet.”
Instead of responding to me, Google decided to go to AFP and clarify the story. Just as I’d suspected, it denied that there was any joint mechanism created or even contemplated for monitoring or censoring video content. Hotovely has been caught once again in an outrageous claim without foundation. Once again she’s been shown to be completely out of her league in dealing with sophisticated international issues and corporations. Not that this will make any difference. Bibi wants attack dogs like her around. He doesn’t care whether they kick up dust a bit and ruffle a few feathers. He can look at Donald Trump’s success in the GOP primaries and say: that guy bad mouths everyone and everything and look where it gets him–right to the top! Hotovely is Israel’s Donald Trump of the moment.
I might also ask Google why they can’t bother to respond to me directly when I approach them and instead choose to approach AFP, who likely read my original post and decided to query the company. But hey, then I’d be naïve wouldn’t I?
Well done! Much appreciated for your great effort.
Thanks to you and all other readers who’ve offered praise for my reporting!
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○ Google Denies Agreement to Monitor anti-Israel Videos
Internet giant contradicts Jerusalem’s claim of jointly tracking incitement via clips posted on YouTube.
Well done Richard. Once again I have to express my amazement at the delusion of people like Hovotely that the immense hatred Israel has generated is due to the formal education of young Palestinians and videos. As if these young people haven’t heard from an early age onward about Israeli misdeeds against their people and have witnessed and/or experienced some of it themselves.
The merit of Hovotely is that she shows the real face of Israel abroad. Being born and bred in the system, and obviously not intelligent enough to look at it critically, she cannot do otherwise.
Prevention of incitement? Part of the motivation here is probably to prevent outsiders getting excited about what is really going on in Israel.
This is not about “Palestinian videos”, but videos glorifying terror and inciting to murder innocent civilians just for being Jewish. You may call it “censorship” or whatever you want, but incitation to murder and terror should not be allowed in any civilized society. Also, it violates YouTube’s Community Guidelines.
@ Bad Boy: News bulletin: no one in the rest of the world sees any of the issues the way you do. No one finds videos of Palestinian resistance or videos showing Israelis killing or beating up Palestinians to be “incitation [sic] to murder.” Only you do. Only you. And Israel, of course. You are alone. Get used to it. Google’s not going to do your dirty work, nor are we.
Neither Google nor any of the rest of us share your phobias and obsessions. And no, none of these videos violate Google’s guidelines.
Someone at Google should take a close look at Israeli videos, especially those demanding “death to Arabs!”. These are explicit and on a par with Rwanda’s Hutu Power RTLM radio. Now maybe Hotovely thinks that Israeli Jews are too stupid to see “death to Arabs!” as a call to arms and that this type of messaging doesn’t lead to action on the part of Israeli Jews against Palestinians. I beg to differ, but history has shown that Israeli Jews don’t need to wait for a video to tell them to kill Palestinians, not when their prime ministers and MKs are as racist as they’ve been since, oh I guess about 1948 and the killing of Palestinians is the raison d’etre of the zionist state.
Great work Richard and thank you.
Jeremiah 5:21 (‘Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not’).
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Google, smoogle.
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What is a hate crime for you is not a hate crime for me. Jewish religious maniacs who are allowed to publicly spout hate messages are allowed to away with it. We are seeing it in practice when Israeli civilians shout “Kill the Arab!” and shoot Palestinians in the street. Leave aside State sanctioned summary execution.
When the world witnesses Israeli security forces breaking down the doors of Israelis to confiscate all copies of Torat Mamelech — a book expounding Jewish exclusivism in its most extreme form, which says the life of a Jew is worth more than a non-Jew, among other insane inanities – and burning them in a big pile in public, we can worry about videos on YouTube.
Hopefully, Google is not just paying lip service, and is telling the truth about its arrangement with the fascist Israel government. I can’t help being a little bit skeptical when I read about these kinds of denials by big corporations!