***

Update: According to a Fox News report, it looks to be an official move. However, none of his earlier videos were restored.

Having reviewed the case, we have restored the account of Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas — and if he chooses to upload the video again with sufficient context so that users can understand his important message we will of course leave it on the site.

And indeed a quick click-through to Wael’s videos produces this line of poetry.

This user doesn’t have any videos at this time!

(Thanks to Marshall at RRW for pointing this out.)

Should Wael choose to do all the work of posting the approximately 100 videos he had (according to CNN) on YouTube again, or anywhere else for that matter, their URLs will change and he’ll have to track back to every post and correct the link. Anyone else who helped to make these videos viral will have to do the same thing. In other words, the very viral nature of what Wael did, which led to a rare prison sentence for two of the police officers involved in one of the instances of brutality, has been severed in one fell and ill-considered swoop.

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Update: If another of the video hosting services wanted to score some serious points, they should offer to intercede with YouTube on Wael’s behalf, salvage his videos and rehost them on their service. They’d be doing justice a nice turn, as well as getting some good P.R. Please help us exert this pressure on them. I have so far contacted Metacafe, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Stage6, Veoh, Eyespot, Blip.tv, Videoegg , Viddler and Jumpcut. Add the weight of your voice to this request.

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Update: According to RSF, Wael’s Yahoo email account was cancelled as well. You stay classy, YouTube.

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Update: Blake Hounshell on Foreign Policy’s Passport blog reminds us that Wael did not just lose access to his account, he lost his entire archive of video, an important document of Egyptian history and actions against police brutality. But really, in the end, this was to be expected. After all, this is YouTube.

YouTube has a shadowy history of eliminating objectionable content to preserve market access, and the company isn’t fully transparent about how it makes such decisions. So, this is going to remain murky. But I think the lesson to online activists is nonetheless clear: Don’t use YouTube, and save your work offline.

No doubt. But easier said than done when YouTube is the dominant force in shared video. Some have suggested using The Hub. The problem with that is that Wael’s videos were so widely seen precisely because they were not segregated in an “activist” ghetto. For that reason, and as much as they suck, I would not necessarily suggest you not use YouTube. I would strongly suggest, however, that you make certain to back up every single piece of video both on media at home, and by posting it on one of the other video sharing sites, like The Hub.

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Correction: According to Amr (see comments), an Egyptian blogger started this rumor and Agence France-Presse reported it without apparently checking it. (Both the blogger and the AFP seem like creeps and boobs respectively for creating and sustaining the rumor. I’m not sure why we the rest of us should be blamed for believing it - a well-known news organization quoting an in-country blogger? If it’s a race to see who’s least responsible I think we have a tie.)

Update: According to AllAfrica (via IFEX), Egyptian bloggers are protesting this action by creating a kind of “film festival.”

Egyptian bloggers, often at the forefront of exposing human rights abuses, are planning an online festival of torture videos to run alongside the 31st Cairo Film Festival, from 27 November to 7 December.

According to the Middle East Times, the “award” will be called the “Golden Whip.”

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The Big Pharaoh, via Simon C., wrote us, along with Esra’a, to direct our attention to another questionable YouTube decision.

YouTube removed the video and shut down the account of Wael Abbas, who recently won an award from the Knight International Center for Journalism for his blogging and other activities. The other activities included posting video of police brutality to YouTube, which he posted on his blog. His posting of footage of the sexual assault of a 22-year-old bus driver by the Egyptian police helped to mobilize global outrage and secure an unusual three-year prison sentence for each of the police officers involved.

According to The Arabist, Abbas’s wasn’t the first torture video that YouTube screwed with.

YouTube administrators played a cat-and-mouse game with us when it came it uploading Emad Kabeer’s videos, taking it down several times, then allowing it censored, then uncensored, then parts of it.. then they take it down, and then put it up again… which has been not the most user-friendly for the anti-torture bloggers when posting hyperlinks or embedding videos. The same troubles were also faced with other police brutality videos that bloggers tried uploading, like the woman murder suspect torture video.

According to Ta3beer, the pretext for the cancellation of Abbas’s account and removal of footage was that it violated the company’s “gratuitous violence” prohibition. Even if the violence were gratuitous, its posting was not. It was journalism and it was just. YouTube’s latest anti-free speech measure is neither.

Contact YouTube and let them know what you think.