YouTube’s rulings on Gaza war videos trigger internal backlash

A month after Hamas militants from Gaza attacked an Israeli music festival last October, Hebrew rap duo Ness & Stilla debuted “HarbuDarbu” on YouTube. The military hype song celebrates the Israeli forces waging war in Gaza and has been viewed over 25 million times. Critics have labeled the song a violent and hateful anti-Palestinian “genocide anthem.” “One, two, shoot!” thunders its chorus.

Despite calls from staff and activists to remove the song, it was allowed to remain on YouTube. Crucially, YouTube has ruled that the song’s violent rhetoric is directed against Hamas, not Palestinians as a whole, and that as a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, Hamas can be subjected to hate speech without punishment, according to three people involved in content moderation at YouTube or who have been briefed on it but are not authorized to speak about it.

In making the highly-watched decision on “HarbuDarbu,” YouTube’s trust and safety team consulted with executives and reviewed internal and external expert interpretations of the song’s lyrics, which contain slang and clever phrases with questionable meanings. The final conclusion was that one of the song’s opening lines, describing rodents coming out of tunnels, shows that the song is about Hamas (which regularly uses tunnels to navigate and hide in Gaza) and therefore does not qualify as hate speech, the sources said.

Staffers seeking to have the video removed say it is hate speech because the text calls for violence against all Palestinians by mentioning Amalek, a biblical term used throughout history to describe Israel’s enemies. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the term in remarks last October following the music festival tragedy, but his office later clarified that his intention was to call out Hamas and in no way to call for genocide against Palestinians.

The reasoning behind why the video remained online and unrestricted, reported here for the first time, is a prime example of what a handful of employees at YouTube and the rest of Google who spoke to WIRED believe is a pattern of inconsistent moderation of content related to Israel’s war with Hamas. The sources believe management at the world’s most popular video platform is playing favorites and trying to justify removals — or find exceptions to keep content online.

YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon did not dispute WIRED’s reporting on “HarbuDarbu” and other videos cited in this article. However, he strongly disagrees with allegations of bias and says it is misleading to draw sweeping conclusions about YouTube’s enforcement approach based on “a handful of examples,” adding that internal disagreements are common in such cases.

“We dispute the claim that our response to this conflict deviated from our established approach to major world events,” Malon said. “The claim that we apply our policies differently based on the religion or ethnicity of the content is simply false. We have removed tens of thousands of videos since this conflict began. Some of these are difficult decisions, and we do not make them lightly and debate to get to the right conclusion.”

war cry

While there have been previous disputes over what belongs on YouTube and other major social networks, sources say the Gaza war has made it almost impossible to reach an internal consensus on content removal. And decisions about what stays online have a big impact on the public response to a crisis that has left Israel in turmoil and Gaza in ruins.

Sources told WIRED they wanted to take a closer look at YouTube’s decision-making because they felt accountability was limited even internally. In the past, YouTube employees would summarize their decision-making logic in emails, chats and phone calls to employees in other Google departments. To avoid controversy since October, that transparency has largely disappeared, the sources say. Malon says the flow of information has increased. But as one source puts it, substance is now missing: “Here’s the decision, we’re moving forward, let’s not keep harping on it.”