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Anwar al-Awlaki

Let free speech include terrorists on YouTube? Your Say

USA TODAY

Anwar al-Awlaki’s lectures, some inciting violence, are available on YouTube. Should they be? Al-Awlaki was killed in a drone strike in 2011. Letter to the editor:

Video image of Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by a U.S. drone strike Sept. 30, 2011.

I agree with commentary writer Mark Wallace, who wrote the piece “Remove terrorists from YouTube: Column.” He urged YouTube to remove the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki from all search results, and to delete links to similar extremists. Permitting this deceased terrorist to continue to spew terrorist propaganda from beyond the grave makes YouTube complicit in successive acts of violence.

Thomas Hale; Pinellas Park, Fla.

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

Comments from Facebook are edited for clarity and grammar:

There are all kinds of maniacs on social media, not just jihadists. If you let them broadcast, then at least you know what they’re up to. If you start picking which voices to silence, some entity — usually the government — starts deciding which voices to silence. Welcome to China.

— Wixell Bickford

I don’t think that we need to know what this guy is up to, given that he has been dead for several years.

— Jennifer Lapsner

The problem, folks, is not the well-adjusted reader looking to research about terrorism. It’s the searcher who is maladjusted, thinks he or she has been treated badly by society, or a person with a self-built perception that he or she doesn’t belong. These people are the ones who would succumb to the alluring words of a jihadist recruiter.

— Clayton Spangenberg

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