Matt Jones's List: video censorship

• Yesterday, Advocacy Director Sami Ben Gharbia, who is also co-founder of the Tunisian news site Nawaat, reported that Nawaat was no longer able to upload YouTube videos to their site, after YouTube staff determined that a video they were trying to upload contained “objectionable content.” 

• unise : enfants des zones défavorisées (Nawaat)
   While it might not seem fair to say you can’t show something because of what viewers theoretically might do in response, we draw the line at content that’s intended to incite violence or encourage dangerous, illegal activities that have an inherent risk of serious physical harm or death. It’s not okay to post videos showing bad stuff like animal abuse, drug abuse, under-age drinking and smoking, or bomb making. Any depictions like these should be educational or documentary and shouldn’t be designed to help or encourage others to imitate them.

   

  This is the second Community Guidelines warning sanction your account has received within six months. Accordingly, the ability to post new content to YouTube from this account has been disabled and will not return until two weeks after you acknowledge this message. Please review the YouTube Community Guidelines and refrain from further violations, which may result in the termination of your account(s).
• The video in question shows a group of young Tunisian children sniffing glue and discussing the practice, which is common amongst disadvantaged youth in Tunisia and is considered to be an extremely dangerous gateway drug. This video is thought to be the first citizen video to document the practice in Tunisia.

• post, he points out that other videos potentially in violation of YouTube's terms of service, including one that infamously depicted the death of Iranian Neda Agha-Soltan and several that show the recent death of Georgian Olympic luge competitor Nodar Kumaritashvili.

   

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• It's a direct challenge to China's Internet filtering regime... shot entirely within World of Warcraft.

    "War of Internet Addiction" is an hour-long protest machinima. It satirizes Beijing's attempt to "harmonize" China's Internet with forced installations of the Green Dam censorware.

    Bit of background. "Harmonize" (和谐) is popular China Net-speak for being censored (as it's done under the slogan of "constructing a harmonious society.")

    "War of Internet Addiction" was directed by Twitter user CorndogCN, and made with dozens of volunteers on no budget (other than WoW fees).

    According to Youku.com, more than 10 million Chinese netizens have seen the movie.

    To navigate the language barriers and cultural in-jokes, read the in-depth analysis by DigiCha and Youku Buzz.

    Check it out while you can. It hasn't been harmonized... yet.

• On January 24th, 2010, Libya Telecom and Technology (LTT) has blocked access to the popular video sharing website Youtube and to several Libyans based abroad political and independent websites such as Libya Al Youm, Al Manara, Jeel Libya, Akhbar Libya,and Libya Al Mostakbal.
• according to Human Rights Watch it seems that Youtube was blocked after videos of family members of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and of demonstrations in Benghazi by families of prisoners who were killed in Abu Salim prison in 1996, were published on the video sharing website.

• The move has worried Libyan bloggers who fear that the ban will be expanded to include their personal blogs. Some Facebook groups, like “We want YouTube back in Libya“, have been set up to protest the ban and provide instructions for how to use proxy servers to bypass it.

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• it was then reported that the Internet governing body Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, which monitors internet access from Pakistan has placed a URL-specific ban on one particular video in which the President of Pakistan Mr. Asif Ali Zardari is seen to deliver a very forceful and curt “Shut-up” to some participant at the rally he was addressing a rally barely a few weeks back.

   

  It must be noted that Mr. Zardari actually says in Urdu

   

  “What has happened to this democracy ……. Shut Up”
• Link to the Blocked Video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzuHD5×1fEU [a few other variants have also been blocked]
• Sources analyzing this recent censorship attempts suggest that the PTA engineers were yet again testing & fine tuning the URL-block list as they slowly nudged these videos inaccessible to Pakistani, this risky trial and error has been the hallmark of the very same PTA engineers who in February 2008 masterminded [accidentally] to knock out the entire youtube.com network as then PTA tried to block a certain election vote rigging video ending up to misconfiguring the DNS records of Youtube resulting an serious outage world wide for a good few hours before youtube scrambled to fix the errors
• Political analysts believe this recent run of censorship is more a knee-jerk reaction by the present rulers of the country as they are facing pressure from a number of areas, more specifically the previously side-lined corruption cases that they had in 2008 nudged away by some illegal constitutional reforms, to get themselves elected have been reopened for a detailed investigation by the Supreme Court of Pakistan which as done away with the various constitutional reforms bringing at stake their appointment to these high-level offices

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