Al-Awlaki was linked to the recent stabbing of British politician Stephen Timms; the 21-year-old student who committed the crime was influenced by the cleric's online calls to jihad. Al-Awlai was also cited as an influence on those who committed last year's shootings at Fort Hood, and he was linked to two bombs found on a Chicago-bound plane last Friday.
UK Security Minister Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones put pressure on the video-sharing site when she told Washington officials that these YouTube videos "incited murder and would be banned in the UK," according to a BBC report.
In a long-waged battle to balance free speech (which, as a commercial entity, YouTube is not legally obliged to uphold) with appropriate content, YouTube has often struggled to maintain the right equilibrium.
Similar sanctions coming from Russian courts earlier this year didn't seem to carry as much weight with YouTube. A court order banned the site on a major Russian ISP because of racist, extremist content such as “Russia for Russians,” a white supremacist video.
And back in 2008, the site completely dismissed complaints from U.S. politicians about radical and terrorist content on the site, saying that YouTube's "reliable community policing system" was adequate and that it would not concentrate on removing content on an ad hoc basis.
Apparently, complaints from politicians, censure from foreign governments and a reasonable sense of duty to the community weren't enough to get hateful and violence-encouraging content off YouTube; a political leader had to be assaulted and a bomb sent to the U.S. for the company to take action.
YouTube wrote in an e-mail to The New York Times that the content being removed violated its terms of service, which prohibit the advocacy of “dangerous or illegal activities such as bomb-making, hate speech and incitement to commit violent acts" or which promote terrorist groups.