A month after Hamas militants from Gaza attacked an Israeli music festival last October, Hebrew rap duo Ness & Stilla released “Harbu Darbu” on YouTube. The military propaganda song celebrates Israeli forces waging war in Gaza and has attracted more than 25 million views; critics have called the song a violent and hateful anti-Palestinian song. “Anthem of genocide”. “One, two, shoot!” resounds its chorus.
Despite demands from employees and activists for it to be removed, “HarbuDarbu” has been allowed to remain on YouTube. Crucially, YouTube determined that the song’s violent rhetoric is directed at Hamas, not Palestinians as a whole, and that as a U.S.-labeled terrorist organization, Hamas can be subjected to hate speech without penalty, according to three people involved in or briefed on YouTube’s content moderation work but not authorized to comment.
In the closely watched decision on “HarbuDarbu,” YouTube’s Trust and Safety team consulted with executives and reviewed internal and external experts’ interpretations of the lyrics, which include slang and one-liners with questionable meanings. The final finding was that one of the song’s opening lines, describing rodents emerging from tunnels, shows the song is about Hamas (which regularly uses tunnels to navigate and hide in Gaza) and therefore does not qualify as hate speech, according to the sources.
The employees who want the video removed say it should be considered hate speech because they say the lyrics incite 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 he had intended to invoke Hamas and not in any way call for genocide of Palestinians.
The reason the video has been left up and unrestricted, reported here for the first time, is a clear example of what a handful of YouTube and 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 management at the world’s most popular video platform has been playing favorites and scrambling to justify removals, or find exceptions to keep content up.
YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon did not dispute WIRED’s reporting on “HarbuDarbu” and other videos cited in this article. But he strongly challenges accusations of bias and considers it misleading to draw general conclusions about YouTube’s enforcement approach based on “a handful of examples.” He adds that internal disagreements over such cases are common.
“We object to the claim that our response to this conflict deviated from our stated approach to major world events,” Malon said. “The suggestion that we apply our policies differently based on the religion or ethnicity depicted in 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 take them lightly, debating to arrive at the right outcome.”
War cry
While disputes over what to post on YouTube and other mass social media have spilled over into the public before, the war in Gaza has made reaching an internal consensus on deletions nearly impossible, the sources say, and decisions about what to leave hold great significance in influencing the public response to a crisis that has left Israel in limbo and Gaza in ruins.
Some sources told WIRED that they wanted YouTube’s decision-making to be more closely scrutinized because they feel accountability has been limited even internally. In the past, YouTube employees in emails, chats, and calls would summarize their logic to employees in other Google units. To avoid contentious discussions since October, that transparency has largely disappeared, the sources say. Malon says the flow of information has increased. But as one source puts it, the substance is now missing: “This is the decision, we’re going to move forward, let’s not dwell on it.”
