Last October, a month after Hamas fighters from Gaza attacked an Israeli music festival, Hebrew rap duo Ness & Stila debuted “Halv Darv” on YouTube. The military anthem glorifies the Israeli military’s war in Gaza and has been viewed more than 25 million times. Critics have called it a violent, hateful, anti-Palestinian “genocide anthem.” “One, two, shoot!” is the refrain.
“HarbuDarbu” remains on YouTube despite calls from employees and activists to remove it. Importantly, YouTube decided that the song’s violent rhetoric targets Hamas, not Palestinians as a whole, and that Hamas, which the U.S. designates as a terrorist organization, can avoid being punished for hate speech, according to three people involved in or briefed on YouTube’s content moderation work but not authorized to discuss the matter.
In the closely watched decision over “HarbuDarbu,” YouTube’s trust and safety team consulted with executives and considered interpretations by internal and external experts of lyrics that contain debated slang and clever turns of phrase. The ultimate conclusion was that the song’s opening line, about rats emerging from a tunnel, indicated the song was about Hamas — which frequently uses tunnels to travel and hide in the Gaza Strip — and therefore wasn’t hate speech, the people said.
The employees seeking the video’s removal claim the lyrics constitute hate speech because they incite violence against all Palestinians by referencing Amalek, a biblical word that has been used throughout history to describe Israel’s enemies. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the word in remarks after the music festival tragedy last October, but his office later clarified that his intention was to refer to Hamas and not to call for the genocide of Palestinians.
The reason for leaving the video available unrestricted, reported for the first time, epitomizes what several YouTube and other Google employees who spoke to WIRED believe is a pattern of inconsistent moderation of content related to Israel’s war with Hamas. The sources believe that management at the world’s most popular video platform is playing favorites and trying desperately to justify the removal or find an exception to allow the content to remain available.
YouTube spokesman Jack Maron did not dispute WIRED’s reporting on “HarbuDarbu” and the other videos cited in this article, but he strongly disputed the accusations of bias and said it was misleading to draw broad conclusions about YouTube’s enforcement practices based on a “small number of examples.” He added that it’s common for there to be internal disagreements in cases like these.
“We dispute any suggestion that our response to this conflict deviates from our existing approach to major world events,” Maron said. “Any suggestion that our policies differ based on which religions or ethnicities are represented in the content is simply false. We have removed tens of thousands of videos since this conflict began, and some of these are difficult decisions that we do not take lightly and engage in discussions to get the right outcome.”
War cry
Debates over what should be on YouTube and other big social networks have spilled over into the public eye before, but the war in Gaza has made reaching internal consensus on removals nearly impossible, sources said, just as the decision about what to leave carries great weight in influencing public reaction to a crisis that has strained Israel and devastated Gaza.
Sources told WIRED they want to bring more scrutiny to YouTube’s decision-making because they feel there’s limited accountability even within the company. Previously, YouTube staffers would outline their thinking to employees in other Google divisions via email, chat or phone calls. Since October, that transparency has all but disappeared, sources say, to avoid contentious discussions. Maron says the flow of information has increased. But, as one source put it, there’s now a lack of substance. “This is the decision. We’re going ahead and not going to think about it any more.”
