YouTube has removed thousands of videos from extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki

al-Awalaki’s vast archive of other videos, such as his lectures on the history of Islam, have been removed, according to the Times, due to pressure from governments and advocates. Using a “hash function” to fingerprint individual videos that flags and puts them before a team of human reviewers, YouTube can prevent the same videos from being uploaded over and over again. The Times notes that where 70,000 videos associated with al-Awalaki were accessible on the site earlier this fall, only 18,600 remain, most of which are news reports about him and his life. The officials told the Times that while their rules prohibit videos that incite terrorism, removing all of al Awlaki’s videos is a special case. - Andrew Liptak, The Verge [via/web:http://streaming-tv.us]