FOXNews.com - Egyptian Blogger Silenced by YouTube
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A prominent Egyptian human rights activist has been muzzled after YouTube and Yahoo! shut down accounts belonging to the award-winning blogger.
Cairo-based Wael Abbas regularly writes and posts video about police brutality, torture and sexual harassment in Egypt. He told FOXNews.com that he's fighting an "electronic war" now that the providers have pulled the plug on his video and e-mail accounts.
Abbas has used his YouTube account to post more than 100 videos of police brutality and public demonstrations over the past few years to further the fight for freedoms in his country. Many of the videos, taken with cell phones, are leaked to him by anonymous posters who find that Abbas will report on the stories when mainstream Egyptian media will not.
"I think this is a new technique that the government is using, which is complaining about the content of some Web sites or some e-mail addresses, in order to disable them — and disable their owners — from what they are doing," Abbas said.
YouTube said the decision to remove Abbas' videos had nothing to do with the Egyptian government, but was rather an internal decision.
"In terms of content that might highlight human rights abuses, of course we support users putting educational, historic, philosophical or documentary footage on the site — even when this may involve acts of violence," a YouTube spokeswoman said. "However, the graphic nature of the content needs to be put in context so that users can easily understand what they are watching."
Many of the videos of police brutality are taken by the officers with their cell phones, who then share them with friends, Abbas said.
Six videos taken down by YouTube and shared with FOXNews.com show alleged police brutality at stations in downtown Cairo and the Imbaba and El Haram neighborhoods of the capitol.
In two videos, a murder suspect confesses after being hung upside down. Her screams are of the pain in her hands, according to an independent translation by FOXNews.com.
"What is important to me is to have these videos available online for anybody because the anti-torture campaign in Egypt hasn't stopped," he said. "There are people being killed in police stations everyday; elections continue to be rigged; there will be interference from the police inside the Egyptian university.
"So these videos are necessary to keep the world informed of what kind of 'democracy' that we have in Egypt and what kind of charade that we have here."
A request for comment from Yahoo! was not immediately returned.
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