That's something that have been happening for a while but, as always, first they came for the undesirables and nobody said a thing.
The Syria civil is going for as long as the term "Arab spring" exists, with protests and the beginning of armed conflict going as back as 2011.
With access to means of communication not controlled by the state the start of this conflict was very well documented, in real time even.
From something happening (a mass protest, a shooting of protesters or policemen, takeover of public buildings) to the post of the video on Twitter or Facebook sometimes not even 15 minutes elapsed. It was all there, live, unedited, raw. Anyone with a mobile phone could show the works exactly what was happening, from all sites involved. All it took was to make a page on FB or an account on Twitter or YouTube and to push "upload".
Or so they thought. See [1] and [2] below for context. Lots and lots of footage, pictures and live testimonial were "scrubbed" by overzealous application of the TOS, usually motivated by organized mass report of content.
It is very sad because not only they believed that, for the first time they could broadcast their message without cost or risk of censorship (they couldn't) but also a very valuable piece of our collective history was lost forever.
Thus first they came for questionable content from a sensitive subject of a conflict in the other side of the world. Now they can apply the same reasoning at home and people will have little recourse because the precedent was set. More and more we hear "first amendment only applies to the government, not to private companies" and that's true but doesn't make it any less sad to cope with the repercussions of this deletionism.
The Syria civil is going for as long as the term "Arab spring" exists, with protests and the beginning of armed conflict going as back as 2011.
With access to means of communication not controlled by the state the start of this conflict was very well documented, in real time even.
From something happening (a mass protest, a shooting of protesters or policemen, takeover of public buildings) to the post of the video on Twitter or Facebook sometimes not even 15 minutes elapsed. It was all there, live, unedited, raw. Anyone with a mobile phone could show the works exactly what was happening, from all sites involved. All it took was to make a page on FB or an account on Twitter or YouTube and to push "upload".
Or so they thought. See [1] and [2] below for context. Lots and lots of footage, pictures and live testimonial were "scrubbed" by overzealous application of the TOS, usually motivated by organized mass report of content.
It is very sad because not only they believed that, for the first time they could broadcast their message without cost or risk of censorship (they couldn't) but also a very valuable piece of our collective history was lost forever.
Thus first they came for questionable content from a sensitive subject of a conflict in the other side of the world. Now they can apply the same reasoning at home and people will have little recourse because the precedent was set. More and more we hear "first amendment only applies to the government, not to private companies" and that's true but doesn't make it any less sad to cope with the repercussions of this deletionism.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/02/the... [2] http://www.vice.com/read/facebook-and-the-crisis-in-syria
P.S. Sorry for the long rant.