Terrorism Convicts To Be Sentenced To Moderate YouTube Comments

Jerusalem, September 7 – Israel’s High Court of Justice approved a draft law intended to impose harsher penalties on defendants convicted of terrorist activity, a bill that would condemn them to moderating the insipid, ignorant, spammy, or downright incomprehensible comments that appear with almost every video on You Tube.

By agreement with Google, which owns the video sharing website, the Knesset is expected to pass a law this week that will increase the penalty for terrorists found guilty of murder or attempted murder from life imprisonment to up to seven hours of YouTube moderation per day. Earlier drafts of the law called for even more hours, but cabinet members asked to review some of the comments that would require moderation deemed that amount cruel and unusual punishment.

As one of the busiest sites on the internet, YouTube attracts hundreds of thousands of comments each day, and Google has embarked on an effort to improve the quality of the experience for users. The default setting for comments is invisible, meaning the viewer must manually elect to read the comments. That has spared myriad users the unpleasantness of having to see the full extent of other people’s stupidity and meanness on display, but the company sensed that too many curious users were still being exposed to the dregs of humanity in typed form.

Algorithms could detect spam and unwanted or irrelevant solicitations, but even after filtering out those types of comment dross, the YouTube system was still saturated with the output of people who, despite knowing how to find the letters and numbers on a keyboard, somehow lack the mental capacity to type anything intelligent. Others clearly possess intelligence, but seem incapable of contributing anything to the world beyond deprecation and scatological insults.

Google therefore issued a tender for proposals to combat this threat to the brain cells and will to live of many of its users, and the Government of Israel submitted the winning bid. The Ministry for Internal Security, which runs the Prison Service and will be charged with implementing the program, began hiring programmers and other personnel to set up a secure system for the inmates to perform their new duties. Initially, a team of 100 terrorism convicts will be given rudimentary training and assigned to isolated terminals, where they will only be served regular meals if they meet a certain hourly quota of comments to moderate.

Given the mental and emotional strain to which the task will subject the prisoners, the court approved a system under which two months of daily YouTube comment moderation will serve as one year of imprisonment, such that a convict incarcerated for twenty years, if assigned to this program, will be able to reduce his sentence. The court also capped the number of months any single prisoner may be forced to moderate YouTube comments at twelve, putting the maximum reduction of a sentence at six years. Convicts serving life sentences may be forced to perform the task in perpetuity, but for no more than three months at a time, and not in the same calendar year as any other such assignment.

Human rights organizations have had mixed reactions. “We will have to study this Israeli law, but our natural inclination is to be wary of it, as it appears to violate the rights of the prisoners,” said a representative of Amnesty International. He explained his organization’s reluctance to give an unequivocal denunciation by noting that a thorough treatment of the matter would require that AI personnel wade through the swamp of YouTube comments in order to conduct the necessary research, a task that the organization’s senior management could not in good conscience give to those under its aegis.

Human Rights Watch was less inclined to withhold criticism. “As a rule, we require more information before passing judgment on this law,” said Executive Director Ken Roth. “But since this is Israel we’re talking about, I see no need for caution. It’s evil and that’s that. No need to investigate.”