When Internet Censorship Goes Too Far
I operate a YouTube channel dedicated to history. For the love of history, I spend hours of my free time making educational videos to teach people about things that happened in the past. As the Jewish genocide by the Nazis in the 1940s is one of the most studied parts of world history, it is a topic often covered by history YouTubers such as myself. Our ability to teach people about this topic is being threatened and restricted. The people trying to restrict us are not in favor of Nazi ideology. To the contrary, they are, in their own way, strongly opposed to Nazi ideology. Our ability to teach people about the Holocaust is being threatened by the German government itself.
As German law currently stands, it is prohibited to show symbology or propaganda in favor of “unconstitutional” political factions (this would obviously include the Nazi party). There are, of course, exceptions in the Strafgesetzbuch Section 86a law ( http://archive.is/xzjTK ) which allow people to show the symbols and propaganda if they are teaching, conducting research, or arguing against the “unconstitutional” ideas.
While good in theory, the application of this law has been clumsy. As explained in the video below by a fellow history YouTuber, shops selling anti-Nazi propaganda have been raided on the grounds that their products have been mistaken for Nazi propaganda (things that could be mistaken for “unconstitutional” propaganda are also banned under 86a). He states his concerns that teachers in Germany will not be allowed to show his videos to students as his reasoning for not including any Swastikas in his content. In addition, for all the effort put into banning this propaganda, people who agree with Nazi ideology have not disappeared. As can be seen in the link above, they simply protest using symbols that have not yet been banned.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/LSjFUOA2oZM
Despite this law already being enforced within their borders, the German government would take it even further. In late 2016, German chancellor Angela Merkel demanded ( http://archive.is/GihU5 ) that social media sites such as Google and Facebook reveal the algorithms they use to recommend content to their users. This came after the leader of Merkel's political party called for these companies to be fined for not removing hate speech from their sites fast enough. Since her re-election in 2017, Merkel's crusade against social media companies has not stopped.
My great fear is that Google will eventually give in to pressure from the German government to enforce Strafgesetzbch 86a onto all their users – not just their German users. If this happens, educational videos on the Holocaust posted to YouTube (owned by Google) will be in perpetual danger of being removed by site moderators in gross misapplications of this law. Videos removed would face an appeals process in which the creators must prove that nobody could possibly mistake their content for advocating Nazi ideas, and creators that fail this appeals process might even have their channels removed from the site.
I could understand how some may think educational content being targeted by anti-Nazi measures is far-fetched. For those who have doubts, I will tell you some of the things that have already been happening on YouTube. First, you may have heard of the demonetization efforts by YouTube during the “ad-pocolypse”. This was an effort by the company to flag content which advertisers do not want their products being shown next to. This means that (in theory) videos that promote hate speech would not get ads put on them, and therefore, the creator of the video would not get ad revenue. In practice, videos containing hate speech did indeed get ads pulled, as did videos by gay rights activists, gamers, and yes, even educational videos such as those in the history genre.
This resulted in months of quiet discontent among myself and my fellow creators. Some of us got patreons and asked our fans to donate money, to make up for the revenue that was lost when our videos were marked “not suitable for advertisers”. Some of us started backing up our content on other video-hosting sites such as vidme. The spark that lit the kindling was one of our own getting banned from YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/yEVqq1i4ahU
The channel Thegn Thrand had, years ago, posted a video where he demonstrated use of a medieval explosive weapon from Japan. The video had been public and fine for years, until YouTube started flagging videos with increased frequency in response to their advertisers. Thrand's video was marked as “instructing people how to commit terrorist acts” and his entire channel was removed without notice. As Thrand stated, he would have been fine removing the video if the moderators had told him to. They did not. They removed his entire channel. Several dozens of channels made videos such as the one above asking their subscribers to sign a petition for Thrand to get his channel back. It took tens of thousands of signatures before YouTube did something.
To quote Ben Franklin's statement from the end of the Constitutional Convention: “There is no form of government but what might be a blessing if well-administered” meaning that even laws such as Strafgesetzbuch 86a might be a benefit to the public if the people enforcing them were just, meticulous, and incorruptible. With what I've seen from YouTube during the ad-pocolypse, I would not trust their moderation team to enforce even the simplest of rules.
My wish is for not only educational videos to be better protected and free speech to be upheld on the internet, but for the German government to repeal Strafgesetzbuch 86a on the grounds that it has done more harm to those who disagree with Nazi ideas than to those who agree with them.
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https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfPBpjMhW4ZhHXA1V_1VVHg