SaudiFlager: cleaning up YouTube
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Crowdsourcing is, says the Wikipedia, “a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.”
It’s, “become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticism,” says the post.
And there’s been, “no shortage of coverage of how activists and NGOs are turning to crowdsourcing to analyze data, map human rights violations, scrutinize the voting records of their MPs, and even track illegal logging in the Amazon,” says Foreign Policy.
But there’s far less coverage on, “how governments are also relying on crowdsourcing to identify dissenters and muzzle free speech,” says the story, citing Thai hardliners as the, “true pioneers with their project Protect The King, where anyone could submit a link to a site that they thought was offensive to the country’s ruler (whose venerable reputation is already very strictly protected by the tough lese majeste laws)”.
Then there’s SaudiFlager whose goal, says SaudiJeans (from whence came to pic on the right), wants to, “clean up YouTube of videos offending to Saudi Arabia by flagging them, continuing »»»
In addition to the unfortunate misspelled name, I believe this campaign has two main problems. First, what is an offending video? What are the criteria for such thing? I mean, what is offending to you can be quite harmless to me, right? So who gets to decide which videos are offending? Second, YouTube is already heavily censored by CITC. Do we need another layer of censorship?
I`m all for free speech, so don`t get me wrong. If you feel strongly offended by a video on the website, go ahead and flag it. Knock yourself out, I`m not going to stop you. Actually, I can`t stop you. But I think that organizing a campaign for such purpose is a just a waste of time and effort. What is worse, it is enforcing yet another form of censorship and that is the last thing we need. CITC is already doing a great job at it that I find myself occasionally amazed by how dedicated they are to this job.
This dedication is shown clearly in their latest blocking spree, which included Twitter profiles like those of @Mashi97 and @abualkhair.
Blocking @Mashi97 was particularly strange because it came after he tweeted about having fried eggs for breakfast, which made him think that maybe someone at CITC does not like eggs. Also, what CITC don`t seem to realize is that blocking profile pages on Twitter does not prevent the users from updating. Go figure.
Which brings me back to online campaigns: should we start one to unblock these guys? I think we should, but currently I`m busy with another campaign of mine: Saudi Unflagger. Who is in?
Definitely stay tuned.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Foreign Policy – Crowdsourcing censorship, August 20, 2009
SaudiJeans – Saudi Unflagger and Blocking Twitter, August 19, 2009
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