The YouTube Clones
YouTube may be the most popular video-sharing site in the world, but similar homegrown sites are popping up and gaining popularity in some of the world’’s most illiberal locales. Just like YouTube in the United States, China’s 6rooms.com, Turkey’s Izleriz.com, and Jordan’s Ikbis.com make it easy for people to upload video of any sort, and ...
YouTube may be the most popular video-sharing site in the world, but similar homegrown sites are popping up and gaining popularity in some of the world'’s most illiberal locales. Just like YouTube in the United States, China's 6rooms.com, Turkey's Izleriz.com, and Jordan's Ikbis.com make it easy for people to upload video of any sort, and the sites remain popular for their nearly endless repository of entertaining material. But these YouTube clones have an additional, unexpected appeal: the power to amplify political protest. "Video has certain power that text doesn't have," says Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley. "Visual media has a powerful effect on [the] human psyche."
YouTube may be the most popular video-sharing site in the world, but similar homegrown sites are popping up and gaining popularity in some of the world’’s most illiberal locales. Just like YouTube in the United States, China’s 6rooms.com, Turkey’s Izleriz.com, and Jordan’s Ikbis.com make it easy for people to upload video of any sort, and the sites remain popular for their nearly endless repository of entertaining material. But these YouTube clones have an additional, unexpected appeal: the power to amplify political protest. "Video has certain power that text doesn’t have," says Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley. "Visual media has a powerful effect on [the] human psyche."
These sites allow people to make political statements without the risk of taking to the streets. Earlier this year, amateur videographers in China edited together images of a coal mine disaster in Shanxi Province with their country’s national anthem playing over it. The video spread quickly on 6rooms and other Chinese sites. Tunisians, who have almost no access to independent media, recently turned to the video-sharing site Dailymotion.com to post videos that criticize the country’s political system. Such sites allow political activists to "create a mask of anonymity that’s harder to track down," says Randolph Kluver, former director of the Singapore Internet Research Centre.
Short of trying to shut the sites down, repressive regimes have few options for regulating the content of video-sharing sites. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t trying. China has taken the soft approach of instructing its video-sharing sites to self-censor by taking down politically sensitive videos. Other countries, including Egypt and Malaysia, have used the courts to jail videographers. The government of Belarus, meanwhile, simply launched its own free video-sharing site for its citizens, Itv.by. It looks and feels like YouTube, but it’s run by government minders. It’s proof that as technology changes, dictatorships are coming up with Web strategies of their own.
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