Has the YouTube Effect stuck again? Wael Abbas (pictured above), a well-known online activist in Egypt, says his YouTube video account has been suspended and his Yahoo! e-mail accounts have been shut down. Abbas had this pesky habit, you see, of posting graphic videos showing police brutality, and his site had become one of the most popular blogs in Egypt.
In one prominent incident, Abbas posted a video on his blog of a police officer binding and sodomizing an Egyptian bus driver who intervened in a dispute between police and another driver.
The video was one of the factors that led to the conviction of two police officers, who were sentenced to three years each in connection with the incident.
Police Capt. Islam Nabih, right, was convicted of torturing a bus driver in part because of video Abbas posted."There are plenty of other video-sharing sites and third-party tools out there for posting viral videos, but Abbas says he's lost his entire archive, the fruit of years of painstaking work. Also this month, Yahoo! accused Abbas of spamming and shut down two e-mail accounts of his.
"It's too early to tell if the Egyptian government had a hand in this, in which case we may have another case of U.S. tech companies kowtowing to authoritarian regimes. YouTube has a shadowy history of eliminating objectionable content to preserve market access, and the company isn't fully transparent about how it makes such decisions. So, this is going to remain murky. But I think the lesson to online activists is nonetheless clear: Don't use YouTube, and save your work offline."
[Wael during the 18 September 2006 anti-NDP protest, Tahrir Sq. Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy]
"This is un-bloody-believable. YouTube has just disabled probably the most important channel for the Egyptian blogosphere. Wael’s videos have been central in the fight against police brutality, and YouTube should be proud the Egyptian anti-torture activists have been using its channels in the current War on Torture… but instead, the YouTube administrators played a cat-and-mouse game with us when it came it uploading Emad Kabeer’s videos, taking it down several times, then allowing it censored, then uncensored, then parts of it.. then they take it down, and then put it up again… which has been not the most user-friendly for the anti-torture bloggers when posting hyperlinks or embedding videos. The same troubles were also faced with other police brutality videos that bloggers tried uploading, like the woman murder suspect torture video."
YouTube disables anti-police brutality channel
YouTube shuts down Egyptian anti-torture activist's account
YouTube shuts off Egyptian blogger's torture videos
No comments:
Post a Comment