I'm so torn. I just got finished an interesting discussion with Sukie
and Alex about this very topic. This week a video of a small seventeen
year old girl being stoned to death by a mass crowd of raving, male
adults was yanked from YouTube. We discussed our feelings about it.
Should there be censoring on the net and elsewhere of something like
this or not?

An interesting compromise was met by YouTube and the man who vehemently
believes this information should be seen by the public. YouTube yanked
it, BUT, they allowed him to sit in front of the camera and give a
fairly detailed account of what happened along with his emotional
opinions about it. In the background was a computer screen with his
website up. He said if you wanted to see it, go to his website. And he
gave the url to it. I thought it was a reasonable compromise in that
specific situation. Because it served a purpose. Amnesty International
is working hard to try to abolish things such as honor killings. And
because these religiously fanatic barbarians were stupid enough to film
it and have a good old time with their cell phone movie cameras, all
their faces are seen. Because this is now a national incident, this
little girl did not die in secret with only hating eyes watching. It
won't change the world, but it will possibly avert another honor
killing in the near future due to AI watching the area very closely
and taking action and due to world wide watchful eyes.

I agree with the lady that said that one thing that came from the
ferret torture movies being made public is that the maniac was stupid
enough to post the video, and action was taken. YouTube tries it's
best to not allow horrific material on the site. But with todays new
fanatical wave of sharing videos via web world wide, you have to
understand that thousands or even millions of videos are being put up
every hour live! It's up to us to help report these bad videos and
ongoing crimes to them and not just complain. If we all work in not
bashing YouTube and the many other video sites that allow us to
communicate truth in an almost live media format, but instead ask for
certain videos to be taken down, then we will still have our cake and
be able to eat it too. We will not have extreme censorship and crimes
like this will be discovered and perpetrators found, also people will
be educated on the existence of such evil. We will also be punishing
such actions.

But as I said, I am torn. I could be very wrong in that the amount of
damage done by publishing movies with animal torture outweighs the
advantages of catching such people and in educating the public. I just
don't know. YouTube and others are in such a precarious situation. It's
physically impossible to screen each video moment to moment. If a sort
of screening process was ever set up, gosh we'd be waiting for God
knows how long to share some things that are very important and that
need to be shared ... plus inevitably things will be censored that
probably should not. This is a tough one.

[Posted in FML 5604]