The Axis Of NoTube: List Of Countries Banning YouTube Over Juvenile Videos Growing

from the banning-makes-the-world-a-better-place dept

Tue, May 29th 2007 7:01pm — Mike Masnick

Well, that didn't take long at all. Following the lead of such forward thinking governments as Thailand and Turkey, it appears that Morocco is the latest country to ban YouTube. The story is pretty much the same. As in both of those other countries, it sounds like the "complaint" is that someone put up a video critical of that country's monarch. You would think that given how the situation played out in both Turkey and Thailand (i.e., the banning gave those videos much more attention and credibility) that someone would have suggested that maybe a countrywide ban would backfire. Apparently, however, nobody bothered to see how badly previous bans had fared. Why bother when you can just ban something and pretend it goes away, when it really is opening up your entire government to ridicule? Update: And just like that, as the publicity about the ban spread, Morocco has lifted the ban.

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9 Comments

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DV Henkel-Wallace, 29 May 2007 @ 7:44pm

banning Youtube gets the job done
Useless by your standards, perhaps. But if your objective is to show the king how loyal you are, mission accomplished. If it creates a big fuss and gets in all the international papers, well all the better.

Think of it as surfing or harnessing or hijacking the Streisand effect!
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dorpus, 29 May 2007 @ 11:03pm

Dead Google Employees Fall From the Sky
Does this mean that more Google employees will find themselves vacationing in countries where their service is outlawed, therefore police arrest them and cut their fingers off one by one?

If anyone cares about those greedy bastards, anyway.
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Anonymous Coward, 30 May 2007 @ 1:34am

I've had enough of Hope M.
That aside, I have lived in a country where the censor laws are much stricter than just a ban of YouTube.
I've come to realise that no matter how hard a country tries to block something, it's always frikkin' easy to get past a block.
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Anonymous Coward, 30 May 2007 @ 5:19am

ya Hope M is just spamming the thread
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Mike4, 30 May 2007 @ 5:33am

Re: The Axis Of NoTube: List Of Countries Banning
Thanks, Hope M., but we can discuss this just fine right here.
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mike allen, 30 May 2007 @ 6:33am

Freedom of speech is paramount we have a monarch in the UK but we are at liberty to say what we think like we should be a republic. that is the difference. If these people cant stand the heat then they should get out of the kitchen or to be more blunt if they cant take criticism or a bit of satire then they should not be in power.
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|333173|3|_||3, 31 May 2007 @ 9:16am

Re:
@7: Technically, I think you could be considered guilty of treason for attempting to remove the monarch, and for inciting others to do teh same thing. I do not expect that anyone would enforce that part of teh law, but I am pretty sure it is still there.
Of course, the UK should not be a republic, but this is not the time or the place to argue this point.
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Erik, 18 Jun 2007 @ 1:49am

Turkey doesn't have a monarch. The criticism that got YouTube banned in Turkey was that of Kemal Atatürk, the secular founder of the modern Turkish state.
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sez, 12 Oct 2007 @ 10:46am

Re:
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