IP Democracy: France, Turkey Hop on Video-Banning Bandwagon

Video-over-the-Internet can be a dangerous thing if you’re a government looking to manage messages. That’s why Turkey and France stand out today as examples of just how threatening unfiltered video can be to political regimes.

A court in Turkey has ordered YouTube to be banned in the country following an escalation of dueling videos that appeared on the site, with Greek and Turkish users trading insults via video clips. The real offenders, from the court’s perspective, are the Greeks, who reportedly accused the founding president of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, of homosexuality.

It’s against the law in Turkey to criticize Ataturk or “Turkishness,” and I guess the suggestion that Ataturk might be gay is just such criticism, in the court’s eyes. YouTube had agreed to take down the videos, but the prosecutor moved forward with this case anyway. YouTube, it seems, is just too dangerous.

France, on the other hand, is making a large part of video-based citizen journalism illegal. The French Constitutional Council has passed a law that criminalizes a huge swath of video-based citizen journalism by making it illegal for anybody other than a professional journalist to film or broadcast acts of violence. Eyewitnesses who film acts of police brutality, for example, or owners of web sites that post videos of riots could be imprisoned under the new law.

The intent of the law, however, was to cut down on acts of juvenile deliquency — the specific idea was to bar the video display of “happy slapping” incidents, where groups of people gang up on individuals for a bit of violent fun (for those of you who don’t know what this sickening phenomenon is, take a look at some of these videos). Nevertheless, the broad language of the law as it was passed could ensnare other kinds of socially useful videos in its net.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on March 7, 2007 3:46 PM to IP Democracy