Barb at thesocialsoftwareweblog picks up on a dustup between MySpace (now owned by News Corp.) and YouTube. It seems that the former was blocking its users from accessing embedded and linked YouTube videos.
According to this post at the YouTube blog, the situation has been resolved and was a “simple misunderstanding.”
But Salvor, a user of both services from Reykjavik, Iceland, sees something more sinister at work. Below is an excerpt from one of Salvor’s posts, which claims that blog content as well as video content was temporarily blocked by MySpace. Salvor’s earlier comments on the episode can be found here and here.
Myspace tried to censor words in blogs - words that somehow interferred with their business interests. I guess the people running Myspace have discovered how extremely bad publicity this censoring was for one of the most popular social networks in the world and I guess part of the deal with Youtube is a hush-up pretending this did not happen.
But it did. And it changed my vision of the world that I live in. Forever. There is no difference in censorship in China when the authorities censor out words like “democracy” and “freedom of expression” and when a capitalist market oriented social networking company censor out words referring to services they do not want their users to have access to.
I guess Youtube has too much at stake not to be friends with Myspace. Therefore all critics and documentation of this censorship has disappeared from their blog. But being one of the Myspace users who got censored I am still angry and feel like the on-line world that I believed in has fallen apart. Especially when the people at Myspace yesterday blocked access to my blog and blocked me so I could not access to my account - presumably because it was critical of Myspace censoring tactics and over 900 people had viewed that post - just in a matter of few hours.
Our only hope is that all the major channels for telling stories or shouting out to the world that something is rotten in the state of Denmark are not controlled by the same company. Think about a world in the future where flickr, myspace, delicio.us, google and technorati and digg are all synchronized and filter out and block information that the ruling class do not want the public to have.
Mitch Shapiro at 11:23 AM|Comments(0)
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