THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
December 2, 2022 at 18:36 JST
Google Inc. headquarters in Mountain View, California (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
Google LLC said it has removed about 200 videos from its YouTube site that violate the company’s hate-speech policies for promoting discrimination against “buraku” people.
Buraku are a social outcast group that have experienced discrimination in Japan dating back to feudal times.
The discrimination is largely tied to their regional locations and occupations once seen as unclean that deal with dead bodies, such as leather tanners and undertakers. The social prejudice extends to their descendants.
The videos, which were posted by a man who heads a publishing company, disclosed the names of places, gravestones and maps, which could be used to identify people as buraku and make them targets of discrimination.
The man who posted these videos had also posted a list of names of places of former buraku online in 2016, and at one point was sued by the Buraku Liberation League and its members, who demanded he remove the list.
The man had started taking videos of buraku communities in Japan sometime around 2018 and then began to share them widely online.
Google said YouTube’s policy on hate speech bans content that promotes discrimination against individuals and groups based on an attribution, including social caste.
But the social media company’s response was slow and came after a widely circulated petition demanded the videos be removed.
The Anti-Buraku Discrimination Action Resource Center launched an online petition to get the videos removed on Nov. 13. Google removed the videos on Nov. 30.
By then, the group had collected more than 28,000 signatures.
The petition also asked Google to clearly state in its YouTube posting rules that disclosing the location of buraku is prohibited.
Masahiko Tanigawa, who heads the Osaka-based Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Institute, was the individual who started the petition and said he thinks it had a big influence.
“A big door was opened within the two weeks or so since the start of the petition,” Tanigawa said.
The internal affairs ministry had previously asked Google to remove these videos, but it had not yet done so, Tanigawa said.
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