Egyptian blogger 3arabawy has done sterling service in documenting the Egyptian revolution over the past few months, putting up thousands of essential pictures both taken by him and other Egyptian photographers. There’s just one problem: Flickr’s guidelines says you cannot put up photograps you yourself haven’t taken and that’s why they’re disabling his account. Never mind that thousands of other Flickr users — including president Obama — do the same and are not interfered with, never mind that 3arabawy has permission from the original photographers, rules are rules and hence the account is disabled. As the Flickr p.r. flacks point out, they could’ve deleted the account outright but wanted to be reasonable about it. (Not that this wasn’t an implied threat if 3arabawy would continue to complain of course). Plenty of people in the thread are also very helpfully explaining why Flickr was right and why violating house rules is so much more important than chronicling the Egyptian revolution and beside, you’re just vain and egocentric.
What bugs me is that Flickr seems to enforce its terms of service much more strictly when it concerns political activists, punishing them for supposed bad behaviour not used against “normal” users. The rule that you cannot post pictures you haven’t made yourself normally has only been used to swat obvious spammers stealing pictures from e.g. the NYT or something, not people who upload their mum’s family album. I suspect that Yahoo/Flickr, like most Big Business, is allergic to everything political, its basic instinct to delete anything controversial. It’s a painful reminder for all political activists not to put their faith in the cloud; while it’s easy, cheap and the best way to quickly spread news, using a commercial service like Flickr always makes you vulnerable to censorship. And it’s not just Flickr, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and any other popular “web 2.0” service have proven to be vulnerable to political pressure, whether external or self imposed.
That’s the fundamental paradox for political activist using the cloud/web 2.0 services: you need to use them if you want people to pay attention, yet using a commercial service like Flickr rather than creating your own makes you vulnerable to its owners. You’re using it on sufferance.