google/YouTube banned Nick Gisburne, a popular atheist commentator when he posted a video that criticized Islam by listing every instance of cruelty in the Koran. If you try to find Gisburne's piece on YouTube, you'll see that his account has been suspended. You can catch the video in all 9 minutes of its glory on Atheism News.
I tried to watch the video. But, honestly I've only made it about half-way through. The nine-minute piece consists of quotes from the Koran coming up on a black screen while a songs from the Matrix plays in the background. Most of the quotes don't stay on long enough to be read fully, or much at all, while the minimalistic visual style fails to achieve an effective sense of textual bombardment either. I'll watch the last half later, but until then that's my film-school analysis of the piece.
Back to google/YouTube's decision to pullt he video down and suspend Gisburne's account. Yes, it's a shame, but I really wouldn't expect anything more from google at this point. when it's profitable and/or safe, google embraces censorship. remember China? Here, I'm sure they wanted to avoid having a fatwa on their hands. They've chosen to disobey the law of the blogosphere instead, and the consequences remain to be seen.
as the reactions play out online, i type to you from my google blogger account, freshly reminded that the web isn't really the utopia of freedom of expression we like to think of it as...and then perhaps the backlash will remind me that it is.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
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1 comments:
I think that the major point this needs to bring home to users is that they are playing in someone elses backyard when they are using blog-services, video-hosting, or anything else. Always read your terms of service because those are the rules of the backyard.
There is no freedom of speech on YouTube, it was never meant to be the land of free information flow. This means that ultimately there can be no actual debate on YouTube because the gods of content censoring will cut you off fearing fatwas, as you pointed out.
I think that the major law of the internet that YouTube has violated however is the law of "whack-a-mole." That is, if you censor the content in one place, you better damn well be ready for it to pop up in fourty other places, and have its message amplified ten fold. Nick Gisburne was removed from the ability to debate his content on YouTube, but as a result his message has been shot around the net like crazy. It has always been this way with banned content, be it the books that the church banned in the last century, or the content YouTube bans in the 21st. There is a delicious goodness in replicating a banned message.
~EJTower
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