Youtube still showing terrorist bomb-making video

DIY guide presented by an Isil militant and watched by the Manchester bomber is still being shared online

A TERRORIST bomb-making video watched by Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, is still being shared on Youtube, the US Senate has heard.

A senate committee, questioning executives from the world’s top social media companies, wondered how the video was getting around the web giant’s safeguards designed to stop extremists posting propaganda and terrorist content.

Executives from Twitter, Google’s Youtube and Facebook said their automatic tools for spotting and quickly removing the content were becoming increasingly effective. But senators said the efforts were still “not enough”.

Sen John Thune, chairman of the commerce committee, said: “According to the Counter Extremism Project, one single bomb-making video used to instruct the Manchester suicide bomber has been uploaded to Youtube and removed 11 times but continues to resurface as recently as this month. How is it possible for that to happen?”

The bomb-making tutorial features a balaclava-wearing Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) group fighter explaining how to build an explosive device with easy to obtain ingredients.

Salman Abedi manufactured a home-made suicide bomb that he used to murder 22 people when he detonated it among crowds leaving an Ariana Grande concert in May 2017.

Juniper Downs, Youtube’s director of public policy, said the video had been entered into a database of harmful films that were being automatically searched for and taken down.

She said: “We are catching reuploads of the video quickly and removing it as soon as those uploads are detected.”

The rapid online radicalisation of a string of “lone wolf ” terrorists in America and Europe has put intense pressure on technology firms to do more to police their platforms.

Youtube has changed its system that allowed adverts automatically to show up on videos, after it was criticised for making money from hate speech. For adverts to appear, channels broadcasting on the website will need at least 4,000 hours of viewing time and 1,000 subscribers – a leap from the 10,000 lifetime views previously required.

Youtube, which is estimated to be worth up to £50billion, hopes that this will avoid a repeat of events last year, where adverts paid for the British government appeared on Isil recruitment videos. It also profited from displaying Mercedes-benz, Waitrose and Marie Curie adverts on videos owned by terrorist factions and the violent pro-nazi group Combat 18.

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