M.I.A.’s controversial “Born Free” video has not, it turns out, been deleted from Google’s YouTube site. The video still lives but has become nearly impossible to find, because of the combined efforts of disturbed users and YouTube’s content-monitoring staff.
The video, which you can view on YouTube to the right, shows military forces rounding up and executing red-headed children. Contrary to news reports that YouTube removed the violent video, the site simply put it behind an age-restricted click-through. That renders the video impossible to find unless you already know the URL.
At least one instance of the video was removed from YouTube and originally marked with a copyright-takedown notice (no longer online) that cited a request by XL Recordings, M.I.A.’s UK label, while UMG sells her music in the US. However, M.I.A. press manager Jennie Boddy told us, “YouTube took it off, not UMG.”
Copyright is not the issue here. Rather, it all has to do with YouTube’s 13-year-old-and-up users stumbling across a violent video in which one child is shot in the head at point-blank range and another is blown up, in graphic detail, by bombs.
YouTube’s head of communications (who declined to be named in accordance with Google corporate practice) told Wired.com that the site does not comment on the flagging or removal of individual videos, but she did point us to a 2008 blog post in which YouTube lays out its policy of burying videos in “‘Most Viewed,’ ‘Top Favorited,’ and other browse pages,” after enough users flag a given video as objectionable.
So why can’t anyone find this video using YouTube’s search function?
As it turns out, YouTube users do not have the ability themselves to to bury a video in search results, no matter how many times they flag something as objectionable. If YouTube’s crowdsourced objectionable-content-detection system alerts staff to a video that should probably be age-restricted, a Google staffer watches the video and decides whether to age-restrict it, which then buries the video in the search results. And Google confirmed that that is precisely what happened here.
“The demotion that happens [in browsable pages] is based on a number of signals, including user flagging activity potentially indicating that the video could be controversial,” said the YouTube spokeswoman. “For the more severe demotion, in terms of not showing up in search results, that’s actually only when a video has been reviewed and age-restricted. However many user flags, or a flagging campaign, could never lead to a video being taken off of search results. It would have to be somebody from the policy-enforcement team reviewing that video and saying ‘Yes, this is in fact not suitable for a general audience.'”
Given Google’s stance towards censorship of its own search engine by the Chinese government, one would hardly expect it to censor YouTube users. Indeed, Google’s policy represents a more open and nuanced approach than what Apple is doing with its App Store. There, presumably overworked employees decide whether to censor content before it even shows up in the store.
The notion that YouTube censored the video completely appears to have originated with the BBC, subsequently spreading to The New York Times (which later updated its article) and then to the rest of the web.
Even M.I.A. was confused, at one point tweeting, “FUCK UMG WHO WONT SHOW IT ON YOUTUBE! FOR THE U.S >>>>>>WATCH HERE http://miauk.com/,” following that up with “OK NOT UMG FAULT!”
It took a little digging, but now you know what really went on here: Google’s YouTube buried, but did not delete, the video for M.I.A.’s “Born Free.”
Updated: UMG is not the parent company of XL Recordings; the former sells the new M.I.A. album in the US, the latter in the UK.
