The Mayor is urging tech and social media companies, including Youtube and its parent company, Google, to take tough action to crack down on videos that encourage gang violence and knife crime.
YouTube has refused to take down four violent videos reported to them by the Metropolitan Police since December. The videos depict gang members threatening and goading rival gangs, describing how they would murder them, making shooting hand signals and waving a Rambo knife.
Collectively, the videos have been viewed more than 356,000 times. Despite YouTube’s own rules stating that ‘threats, harassment, intimidation (and) inciting others to commit violent acts…are taken very seriously’ and the Met providing detailed context, the site claimed no breach had taken place.