Last week, Representative Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) introduced a bill expressing the sense of Congress that the YouTube video hosting site should not allow “jihadist propaganda.”
“The war against Islamic radicalism is both a shooting war and a battle of ideology. Our enemies understand that they cannot defeat us face to face on the battleground, so they have created a new battlefield on the Internet,” Shuster said in a press release.
Er, no. The jihadis don’t really know how to create anything, except maybe bombs. We built the Internet.
One of the core principles of free speech is that the best way to fight bad speech is not with censorship but with good speech. Shuster obviously doesn’t know this or doesn’t care.
It’s also obvious that he doesn’t have a clue about the sort of stuff that’s actually on YouTube. Yes, there might be a few dozen jihadist propaganda pieces, but the other 10 million or so videos are likely to be a bit of a distraction. The jihadi-wannabes may come for the crappy revolutionary speeches, but once they look around at some of the other videos, they’ll soon realize that our way of life is better than theirs.
Let me put it another way: Gary Brolsma’s “Numa Numa” video appears many times on YouTube and just one of the copies has been viewed 1.7 million times.
The jihadi’s will never catch up.
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