Wael Abbas’ YouTube channel suspended [UPDATED - 29 Nov 07]

News just in from Hossam El-Hamalawy…:

I’ve just received the following message from blogger and friend Wael Abbas…

disaster: youtube disables my account claiming there were complaints about my police torture videos!!!

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…

Wael’s channel is, at the time of writing, still suspended. Clicking on any of the videos he uploaded results in the following message:

“This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”

Whether it’s only Wael’s account, or others too, now several videos showing police brutality embedded on the Hub from YouTube are no longer playing – including this one, this one, and this one, and more here, here, here, and here. Most of these clips have been propagated far beyond Wael’s own YouTube account, so it’s not really a question of stopping these videos from circulating. Only last week, Wael received an award from the International Center for Journalists in honour of his work to promote and advance human rights in Egypt.

Whatever the reason – a misunderstanding, a systematic campaign, something else entirely – it shows how vulnerable human rights-related media content can be in the online environment, and that the minimal extra work of uploading human rights media to dedicated sites like the Hub, or the Internet Archive, rather than just embedding it from other sites, is clearly worth it.

UPDATE on 27 November 2007:

Since this happened, I’ve been in contact with YouTube to find out why Wael’s account was suspended, and will post an update when I receive one. The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker also reported the story (one commenter mentions the Hub) and now Reuters has covered the story too:

Elijah Zarwan, a prominent blogger and activist in Egypt, said he thought it was unlikely that YouTube had come under official Egyptian pressure, and was more likely reacting to the graphic nature of the videos.

“I suspect they are doing it not under pressure from the Egyptian government but rather because it made American viewers squeamish,” he said. “But to shut them down because some people might find the truth disturbing is unconscionable.”

UPDATE on 29 November 2007:

Nothing to report from YouTube yet, but increasing speculation/coverage in the blogosphere: Amira Al-Hussaini at GV (pt/ar/de), Kevin Anderson at The Guardian (my comment here), and Stan Schroeder at Mashable.

Free To Speak (on BBC World Service)

[Slight changes below, after a second look at the project...]

For me, the 2002 series I Have A Right To… still represents a good benchmark for how the BBC’s World Service can knit together human rights resources of real and lasting value – and that others can use and build on.

Now, the World Service is celebrating its 75th Anniversary with a season of programmes, debates and chunks of participation related to freedom of speech, in an upcoming season called Free To Speak [thanks, Solana].

As usual, no one does global broadcasting quite like the World Service, with Roy Greenslade fronting a four-part radio series on the freedom of the press, for example, but the online experience feels pretty disjointed by comparison. There are elements in the online parts of the season that hold useful nuggets, however:

- A timeline of the history of broadcasting, including “media minutes” for each year, and which at the time of writing stretches up to the 1970s. There’s a lot of conflict, a lot of politics, and perhaps a bit too much of the presenter, and not enough of the actual audio, but it’s still of value, as this audio clip from 1965 shows, attesting to the power of the televised image in galvanizing the civil rights struggle in the USA…

- A selection of six conflict-related images from Magnum Photos (a Hub participant) from an exhibition at Bush House, the central London building where BBC World Service is housed…

- Photographs sent in by people holding their favourite political protest slogans… [all seemingly outside Bush House..]

- And a request for people to contribute their stories of freedom of speech to the MemoryShare timeline…

Care to point us to any current (and more effective) examples of this kind of online initiative from local media around the world?

NewAssignment.net’s 6 lessons

Another nugget via Andy Carvin – I’d welcome comments on how this might look different when applied to the Hub:

Jay Rosen of NewAssignment.net is talking about some of the lessons learned from their first networked journalism experiment with Wired News, which focused on trends in crowdsourcing. He said there were six lessons, but he threw in a seventh for good measure.

1. Division of labor is key in distributed reporting projects. You need to think about what task, and what size of task, you expect people to do.

2. You have to get the motivations right. If you don’t understand participants’ motivations, you can’t figure out how to define the work.

3. Watch for rising coordination costs. More users=more costs, ie answering questions, giving out instructions, etc. You can get your project run into the ground by succeeding with lots of people.

4. If I go off and do something for you, now I have to come back and give you that data. When this happens, people need to see how their contribution fits into the puzzle.

5. Share background knowledge. The more background they have, the easier it’ll be to find data that’s significant.

6. Existing communities already know how to interact and work. They’re better than starting from scratch.

7. The one percent rule – only about one percent of users will actively get involved in creating content, while 10 percent might be involved in peripheral activities like commenting.

Habermas, Rheingold and the Internet as public sphere

The upcoming World Electronic Media Forum includes a session called “Explosion and Fracturing of Public Sphere“, featuring my old boss, James Deane (alongside Aida Opoku Mensah of the Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and Sharmini Boyle of Young Asia TV).

This Howard Rheingold piece (hat-tip, Ethan Z) is a must-read prior to that, particularly the last third and the pieces he points to.

Amnesty International’s “Unsubscribe” campaign video

Amnesty International’s UK section has released its Unsubscribe Campaign video, and it’s visceral and powerful.

Andy Carvin has an interview with the team behind the videos here (as Andy says on his blog: “Be forewarned that it’s very unsettling, and not at all appropriate for children.“):