The YouTube Clones
\n<\/a>By Cyrus Farivar<\/p>\nYouTube 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\u2019s most illiberal locales. Just like YouTube in the United States, China\u2019s 6rooms.com, Turkey\u2019s Izleriz.com, and Jordan\u2019s 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. \u201cVideo has certain power that text doesn\u2019t have,\u201d says Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley. \u201cVisual media has a powerful effect on [the] human psyche.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s political system. Such sites allow political activists to \u201ccreate a mask of anonymity that\u2019s harder to track down,\u201d says Randolph Kluver, former director of the Singapore Internet Research Centre.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t mean that they aren\u2019t 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\u2019s run by government minders. It\u2019s proof that as technology changes, dictatorships are coming up with Web strategies of their own.<\/p>\n
Cyrus Farivar is a freelance journalist based in Oakland, Calif.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Foreign Policy Magazine NET EFFECT: HOW TECHNOLOGY SHAPES THE WORLD September\/October 2007 The YouTube Clones By Cyrus Farivar 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\u2019s most illiberal locales. Just like YouTube in the United States, China\u2019s 6rooms.com, Turkey\u2019s Izleriz.com, and Jordan\u2019s Ikbis.com make it easy for people to upload video of any sort, and the sites remain popular for their nearly…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[103,188],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-journalism","category-tech-in-far-off-lands","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-mq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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