Wael Abbas, an award winning journalist who has posted videos documenting police brutality and torture in Egypt over the last 3 years, had his shut-down YouTube account restored by Google last night after a week of international pressure. The restored account, though, no longer contains any of Abbas's more than 100 videos. YouTube told media tonight that Abbas can freely upload his videos again and if satisfactory explanation of the violence is included then they will be allowed to remain on the site.
Two weeks ago Wael Abbas traveled to Washington DC to be awarded the 2007 Knight International Journalism Award along with Burmese investigative reporter May Thingyan Hein and Founders Award winner Tom Brokaw. One week later, Abbas's YouTube account was shut down by the video hosting service, citing the prohibition against "gratuitous violence."
Far from gratuitous, the videos Abbas posted were in part of his own collection and in part from cell-phone video sent to him by people around Egypt. One clip he helped publicize depicted a bus driver's being sexually assaulted by police officers and resulted in the very unusual criminal conviction of the officers. It's widely acknowledged that torture by government officials is widespread in Egypt. See also our coverage earlier this month of Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman's first of four planned years in prison for the crime of "defaming the President of Egypt." The country is one of the largest recipients of US foreign aid in the world.
A YouTube spokesperson made the following statement to Fox News tonight.
"Having reviewed the case, we have restored the account of Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas — and if he chooses to upload the video again with sufficient context so that users can understand his important message we will of course leave it on the site."
I wonder if an explanation posted in Arabic would meet YouTube's standards of sufficient context for users of the site to understand what's happening in the clips. None the less, links to the videos still lead to a message reading "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation." As if these were ripped-off copies of the Daily Show.
Abbas has archived copies of all the videos he had uploaded, but requiring him to upload them again and breaking the URLs of all the original embeds around the web, links and viewership analytics is a low blow by YouTube. It's also another spot that will remain on the human rights record of Google, one of the world's most powerful companies and ostensible forces for free communication.
For updates, see The Committee to Protect Bloggers - where you can read daily about authoritarian efforts around the world to squash the democratizing potential of the web.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: YouTube Restores Egyptian Anti-Torture Activist's Account - Minus All His Videos.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1803
Tay Zonday, the young man behind the Chocolate Rain song and megameme, is among 100 YouTube power users selected to be added to the YouTube Partners program - the site's ad revenue sharing plan for high quality, original content.... Read More
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
What the hell is this? Does google only want to allow funny/family videos on youtube? I really think that google has slowly spoiled its very carefully built "Do no evil" brand name by either falling to China's demands or removing such kind of videos. What I want to know is, if videos by a world famous journalist like Abbas are suspectible to being removed, then it is no longer a platform of hard hitting journos. They may have removed many such videos from lesser known people that we dont know about. Where do people then with uncomfortable videos go to?
Posted by: Mayank Kumar | December 2, 2007 12:05 AM
Posted by: Search◊ Engines WEB | December 2, 2007 2:01 AMYes, but Yahoo disabled his Email Account - so he posts on his latest blog entry
I would point out that the terms of service prohibit "graphic or gratuitous" violence. Videos of torture and assaults certainly may qualify as graphic violence. Of course, I think they should be left up on YouTube since the intent of the terms was not likely to prohibit this sort of video and the world should know about and see these things so that they can be changed.
It's also not clear if there was information added with the videos that provided context for what they were or if the people at YouTube had to guess what the videos were about.
Should they restore the account and videos with the previous links intact? Yes. Is this perhaps an understandable and forgivable mistake? Yes, again. Google does a lot of good things in this world but they are are a group of people and they can and will make mistakes and exercise poor judgment on occasion. If they make it right I say we forgive and move on and focus some more of our outrage on Egypt's government torturing people and less on Google deleting a video or suspending a YouTube account.
Posted by: Kevin | December 2, 2007 2:25 PMGoogle did wrong by this and they have the power to re-post all the files, their probably just sitting there on the server anyways, but I say find better hosting for them,youtube sucks.
Posted by: YouTubeHater | December 2, 2007 2:43 PMWhen has Google ever done anything good in this world?
Wait: when has Google ever done anything good in this world for anyone besides Google? And what was it?
Posted by: manodogs | December 21, 2007 5:29 PMNice site. Thank you.
Posted by: personal loans | December 25, 2007 5:33 PMhttp://guaranteedpe.forum24.se personal loans
Nice site. Thank you.
Posted by: personal loans | December 25, 2007 5:33 PMhttp://guaranteedpe.forum24.se personal loans