World Governments Target YouTube

Since its launch in February 2005, YouTube has been blocked or banned by a number of countries, among others China, Iran (and several other Middle East countries), Pakistan, Turkey, Burma and Brazil. The issue was highlighted in late February when Pakistan caused an international four-day outage in its most recent attempt to block the site. As can be expected, the reasons for banning the Google-owned video-sharing site vary from country to country.

Pakistan: Religious or political control

The Pakistan government has, since early 2006, blocked 12 web sites (among them YouTube) that displayed controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) orders the nation’s 70 internet service providers (ISPs) to block targeted sites.

YouTube was barred on 22 February over a "blasphemous" clip which purported to be a trailer for the anti-Quran film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, "Fitna" ("Sedition"). Although Pakistani officials insisted the move was due to the presence of offensive, anti-Islamic material, many commentators in the Pakistani press and cyberspace saw it as an attempt to suppress videos about election rigging. The videos, which were subsequently broadcast on Geo TV, were apparently shot with hidden cameras and showed vote-tampering at polling stations.

Sites other than YouTube have been affected by the PTA-ordered blackouts. The blogspot.com domain was blocked, according to Don’t Block the Blog, a group of Pakistani activists. In February 2006, the ISPs’ mass blackout blocked access to millions of popular web sites including Google.com, Download.com, Microsoft.com, Gmail.com and Yahoo.com.

China: Full set of censorship tools

Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China is conducted under a wide variety of regulations (over 60) and they are vigorously implemented by provincial branches of state-owned ISPs and businesses. The internet police task force is estimated at more than 30,000. Critical comments on internet forums are usually erased within minutes.

The Golden Shield Project (referred to outside China as the Great Firewall of China), owned by the Ministry of Public Security, was launched in 1998. According to Wikipedia, China uses the full toolbox of censoring methods: IP blocking, Domain Name Service filtering and redirection, URL filtering, Packet filtering, Connection reset, web feed blocking and reverse surveillance.

On 31 January, China’s state media regulator imposed tough new rules governing the control of audio-visual content on the internet. According to a notice posted on the State Administration of Film, Radio and Television website, only state-controlled entities holding a three-year broadcast licence will have the right to operate websites containing professionally published audio-visual content. The regulation has been widely seen as a move by China to restrict online videos to state-controlled sites, and to require internet providers to delete and report a variety of content.

According to a report published by the New Delhi-based Indo- Asian News Service, the video regulations may have been triggered by a widely-reported incident in which China’s top sports presenter, Zhang Bin, is humiliated by his wife on the state-owned CCTV-5 channel. The video clip was circulated on video-sharing sites outside of government control. The clip – part of a show-piece live programme where the state sports channel CCTV-5 was renamed the Olympics Channel ahead of the 2008 Games – has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

In October 2007, the internet was abuzz with speculation that YouTube had been blocked by the Chinese authorities. Several bloggers and commenters confirmed that they could not access YouTube, as well as other sites such as MySpace.

Marc van der Chijs, entrepreneur and co-founder of rival, Chinese- language video-sharing site Tudou.com, confirmed in his blog Shanghaied (www.marc.cn) on 18 October 2007: "YouTube indeed did not load (message: ‘The server stopped responding’)".

Some attributed the blackout to the 17th Communist National Congress being held in Beijing (from 15 October 2007). Others attributed it to the fact that YouTube had launched a Chinese- language version of the site, for Hong Kong and Taiwan, on 18 October. (Reuters reported on 6 February 2008 that "YouTube is often blocked during high-level political events in China, while online encyclopaedia Wikipedia and Yahoo’s photo-sharing network Flickr have also been periodically blocked").

Blogspot, Wikipedia, Flickr and Livejournal have all been blocked by the Chinese authorities at one time or another. The websites of foreign media such as CNN, NBC and the Washington Post have also been blocked.

‘Taboo topics’ inevitably censored include anything related to the Dalai Lama/Tibet independence movement, the outlawed Falun Gong, and the Tiananmen Square protest.

Blocked websites are re-routed to Chinese search engines such as Baidu. According to a Harvard study, at least 18,000 websites are blocked.

On Chinese-media site, danwei.org, "Kevin S" on 21 July 2006 commented: "Sometimes I can hardly believe that China, circa 2006, blocks BBC, Wikipedia, Technorati, Blogspot, WordPress.com, etc. We can expect popular foreign Web 2.0 apps/sites to be censored eventually."

Iran: Host of foreign sites banned

Iran is considered to have one of the most repressive internet- censorship regimes in the world, and is given the worst ranking by watchdog bodies such as Reporters Without Borders and OpenNet Initiative. Critics accuse Iran of using filtering technology to censor more sites than any country apart from China. Censorship is aimed at purging the country of all Western cultural influences.

YouTube is banned in Iran, along with Flickr and a number of blogging platforms, PersianBlog to name one.

In a clampdown in December 2006, Iran shut down some of the most popular sites, including Amazon.com, the International Movie Database (imdb.com), Wikipedia and most other informational databases and search engines. Anyone attempting to access these is met with a page reading: "The requested page is forbidden". Most forms of media are vetted by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

Iran, with 7 million internet users, is believed to have the highest rate of web use in the Middle East after Israel. The net’s popularity has spawned an estimated 75,000 Persian bloggers, many opposed to the Islamic regime. On 29 August 2007, the Committee to Protect Bloggers reported that Facebook had been banned in Iran. However, there was some confusion. "ISPs did it, which makes it unofficial … some say Facebook is loading too slow which might be ‘intentional’, and others say Facebook is as ‘fine as ever’. MySpace and YouTube are the ones with official bans, apparently, as well as many personal blogs."

Burma: Ban during protests

In Burma, YouTube was banned during protests last year. Mizzima News (www.mizzima.com) reported on 7 September that the site, which featured video of protests against the military junta, had been banned. The site was blocked by the country’s two ISPs.

The military government, which took power in a coup d’etat in 1988, controls all media in the country and in 1996 passed several repressive laws to control the flow of information. Protests are banned and information that undermines "state security, national solidarity and culture" is a criminal offence.

Television, video and film are all regulated. Even satellites, video-cassette recorders and computer equipment are controlled.

In 2000, the Internet Law, which prohibits postings that are harmful to state interests, was issued by the State Peace and Development Council.

According to a study conducted by OpenNet Initiative in 2005, internet censorship is mostly confined to websites related to pro- democracy groups or pornography. In addition, 85% of email service provider sites are blocked. The Myanmar Information Communications Technology Development Corporation licenses cybercafs. Users are required to register, and owners are required to save screen shots of user activity every 5 minutes and, upon request, deliver them to MICTDC.

During the 2007 protests, cybercafs prohibited users from browsing banned sites, including news websites such as www.cnn.com and dissident websites, including Mizzima.

Censorship for all reasons

The wide range of reasons advanced for blocking YouTube around the globe reveals how exposed it is to many agendas and vested interests.

Turkey has banned YouTube several times over insults to their founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, or "insulting Turkishness" – a serious crime under the controversial Article 301 of the penal code. The Turkish Telecommunications Board is ordered by court order to block any site falling foul of this law. Turkish authorities claim it is not government censorship, but legal process. However, critics say the law is used to silence government critics.

In the United Arab Emirates, YouTube was blocked because it presented a seven-part documentary "Desert Nights", on the trafficking of Armenian women for the prostitution industry in Dubai. Ara Manoogian, the Armenian journalist who made the documentary (along with Edik Baghdasaryan), claimed in a blog (aramanoogian.blogspot) on 19 June 2006 that police and migration service officials in Dubai were involved in the prostitution racket. News site Hetq Online, which reported the claims, was also blocked.

In Morocco, users were unable to access YouTube because of, it was reported, videos critical of the government’s treatment of the people of Western Sahara, a territory that Morocco took control of in 1975. YouTube was unavailable for five days from 25 to 30 May 2007. According to reports, footage of Moroccan police beating female independence protestors in Laayoune was featured. Global Voices advocacy reported on 26 May 2007: ‘This is the third major site blocked by the Moroccan filtering regime after Google Earth and Livejournal."

In Brazil, YouTube was blocked for several days in January 2007 as a result of a private action by the model Daniela Cicarelli, on the grounds that a video clip (depicting a sexual encounter at the beach, shot by a paparazzo) was being used without her permission. Some of the country’s ISPs implemented a court order that the site be blocked, making YouTube inaccessible in some parts of Brazil. The ban was reversed by the Supreme Court after a few days.

In Thailand, the government last year banned the site for about four months because of clips that were considered offensive to King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

In Syria, YouTube was blocked in August 2007, apparently over a satirical video featuring the First Lady in Marilyn Monroe-style, with her dress blown up, bidding farewell to a foreign dignitary at the airport.

Moral justification for censorship

University of Toronto-based Nart Villeneuve (www.nartv.org), who monitors internet censorship, points out that, "It is often under the rubric of morality and public order and/or national security that internet censorship is framed by those who seek its implementation or seek to justify its ongoing practice. The practice of filtering … is growing. Increasingly, it is not the practice of filtering that is being challenged, the debate is about what content is being filtered. In other words, how the practice of filtering is being framed is the location where ideas about censorship are being contested. China, for example, justifies its extensive internet filtering and surveillance systems by ‘stressing repeatedly that Chinese internet minders abide strictly by laws and regulations that in some cases have been modelled on American and European statutes’, Chinese official Liu Zhengrong told the New York Times."