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Syria has restored access to video sharing website youtube and social networking website facebook. Access to youtube had been blocked in August 2007 and Facebook was blocked in November 2007. Syrians were unable to directly access these websites and could only gain access to them using proxy servers. While internet users in Syria were able to directly access these sites now, the head of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression, Mazen Darwish, would only say that he had “semiofficial confirmation” the ban is being lifted.
Farewell Andy Gray, the former Scotland international with a penchant for dull jokes about women and the offside rule.
Gray has been sacked by Sky Sports after videos of him emerged on the Internet speaking off air: more than once, apparently, Gray had questioned assistant referee Sian Massey’s understanding of the offside rule.
After journalist James MacIntyre unearthed footage of Gray making a slightly off colour-joke today, the writing was on the wall for the former Everton star.
The reaction seems, so far, to be pretty unsympathetic. But one can’t help feeling queasy about the dismissal. Were Gray’s comments made on air? No. Has anyone at Sky Sports ever complained to human resources about Gray before? We haven’t been told. Will Richard Keys and others who took part in these conversations also be sacked? We’ll see.
But at the moment, Gray looks like a victim of Sky brand management. More worryingly, this adds to a culture where the internet has moved from a tool for popular free expression to a tool of citizen surveillance. Be careful what you say: it’ll probably end up on YouTube.
Recent reports on the stabbing of Labour MP Stephen Timms seem to suggest that his attacker Roshanara Choudhry was “radicalised” by the Internet, and specifically videos of Yemen-based Anwar al-Awlaki on YouTube.
The Telegraph’s report on interviews with Choudhry is revealing: it is claimed she “did not attend mosque” and had “no-one to answer questions about her faith”.
This strikes one as somewhat disingenuous: Choudhry’s misfortunate parents are both said to be practicing Muslims, and it is not difficult to find a mosque in east London. There are people to ask. So the question arises: was it that she had no one she could ask about her faith, or no one who would tell her what she wanted to hear: that she should become a jihadi, or even a shahid.
Much was made of Roshanara Choudhry’s bright academic record, as if this made her receptiveness to jihadism all the more unusual. But this displays a seemingly wilful ignorance of Islamist politics, and its hold on UK, and particularly London, university campuses.
Only a few weeks ago, anti-extremist think tank the Quilliam Foundation produced a report on the hijacking of university Islamic society’s by far-right Islamists, focussing on City University in Islington, north London.
As it happens, I attended City University myself, over a decade ago. Even then, groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir and its extreme splinter Al Muhajiroun had a strong presence on campus, and exerted disproportionate influence on the Muslim student population. This trend, by all accounts, has only intensified post 9/11, and is manifested throughout London’s universities.
So it is seems unlikely that Choudhry would not have encountered extremism before logging on to YouTube.
But that is the narrative being spun. And there seem to be to be several reasons for this.
It is a measure of the ubiquity of the web in modern life that we now tend to appeal to it for solutions and bemoan it when things go wrong in our society.
Humans always look for an overarching reason when we feel that something has gone badly wrong: in the past, we imagined that capricious gods decided our fate. Now, when an ugly phenomenon rears its head, we look over its shoulder to find a cause beyond the phenomenon. We blame “the Internet”.
There are, of course, some major sites that most of us use daily: chiefly Google, YouTube and Facebook.
When Facebook pages sprung up dedicated to murderer Raoul Moat (pages, incidentally, that contained as much criticism as praise, and more irony than either) Prime Minister David Cameron sincerely suggested that he would consult Facebook about the possibility of removing them. Let us not engage with the content: let us instead rush to have the content hidden.
So apart from its assumed omiscience and omnipresence, Google (and Facebook, and well, all web services) faces another problem. We all assume we know how easy it is to remove something from the web. And you know, it is fairly easy. Technically adept people will always be able to dig up ghosts of Internet past, but for the majority of people, when we press “remove” on Facebook, or unpublish a page on blogger, that’s pretty much the end of it. Censorship seems easy, and doesn’t carry the same taboo as pulping books or running lines of blue pencil over a correspondence.
But just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should. If we are to be serious about free speech, which we are supposed to be as a society that aspires to democracy, then we have to accept that poisonous ideologies will be disemminated: it is only when only very specific, credible, direct, incitement or threats are raised that we should even conceivably discuss censorship.
While al-Awlaki, bin Laden and others may call for jihad against the kuffar, surely it was Choudhry’s own interpretation of this that led to her vicious attack on Timms.
Which brings us to the area of personal agency: the majority of the vast amounts of material uploaded to YouTube is put there by individuals: That is the real glory of the site. Google states:
“YouTube has community guidelines that prohibit dangerous or illegal activities such as bomb-making, hate speech, and incitement to commit violent acts. We also remove all videos and terminate any account registered by a member of a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization and used in an official capacity to further the interests of that organization.”
Which you can agree or disagree with.
But the company also says:
“What we can’t do, and which few people would want a private company to do, is check what people want to post online before they do so. The truth is that due to the huge advances the internet has enabled in free expression, offensive or even illegal content may appear for a time, but we have clear rules and will continue to apply them to material brought to our attention.”
This seems right: while one may have difficulties with certain provisos, the greatest offence would be for YouTube to monitor and edit every last piece of content uploaded. Apart from being undesirable, it would quite simply be impossible.
If we are worried about the spread of jihadist ideology and its appeal to people such as Roshanara Choudhry — which we should be — then we are much better served actually learning about it and examining it, giving society power to challenge its arguments. We cannot do this if our first impulse is to block it out.
After being blocked for two years YouTube can now be accessed again by Turkish citizens. The Google-owned site was originally banned in May 2008 under a 2007 law that allowed courts to block any website where there was “sufficient suspicion” that it had committed a crime. YouTube was accused of hosting videos that insulted the country’s founder, Kemal Ataturk, an offence in Turkey. The minister in charge of internet issues, Binali Yildirim, has said that the offending videos have been removed.