Thursday, October 12, 2006

Does this matter?

According to Robert Cox of The Examiner, more and more web content is controlled by organizations that have leftist sympathies, if not tendencies. What would seem to be a non-issue became much more interesting last week when Michelle Malkin, blogress and commentator for Fox News, was notifed by
YouTube, the world’s most popular video sharing service, that her video had been deemed “offensive.” The result? Her account was terminated and her videos deleted.

Cox goes on to say that
according to USA Today, 98 percent of the money donated to political parties by Google employees — “Google Millionaires” — went to Democrats.

Google now owns YouTube.com.

I went to Malkin's site and first found her post about the video deemed so "offensive" by YouTube members. You can download it here. It's a Windows Media file about 2.2 MB in size.

Then I found her post about the removal of the video from YouTube:
Back in February, you may remember, I cobbled together a little mini-movie called "First, They Came" inspired by the Mohammed Cartoon riots. It's a simple slideshow highlighting the victims of Islamic violence over the years. We posted it at YouTube a while ago. No problems. Until last week, when I received this e-mail:
Your video "First, they came" has been rejected due to its inappropriate nature. Please refer to our terms of use for more information on what video material is not permitted on YouTube.

Strangely, my conservative YouTube group (now nearly 1,000 members strong) has also now been "flagged" for containing "content that is inappropriate for some users."

Yeah, inappropriate for members of the Religion of Perpetual Outrage.

Watch the video and tell me if it's "offensive".

2 comments:

Brian Dunbar said...

It occurs to me that the Left has complained that talk radio is dominated by the Right.

The correct response is that it's a business and responds to market pressure. If people wanted to listen to liberal talk shows there would be more of them.

This isn't quite the same thing but the parallel struck me.

If people want to watch Malkin's video then she can put up a server.

Maybe a competing service - FreeTube.com - free video content, no censorship, say.

Which is to say I don't thin it's a huge deal. It's easy to post content on the internet; computers are cheap, bandwidth ain't bad, most importantly the knowledge of how to do all this is widespread.

Steve Erbach said...

Brian,

And here I just heard yesterday that Air America has filed Chapter 11. You're absolutely right about liberal talk show market success.

Malkin herself doesn't appear fazed by the removal of her video from YouTube. She even corrected the author of the piece I quoted to say that her account had not been canceled.

Steve Erbach
The Town Crank