The use of social media sites by the politically-minded in recent demonstrations is probably behind the block. There is now a Facebook group for unblocking YouTube in Sudan. As of Tuesday morning there are 495 members.

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Victor sends us a link to a story on YouTube being “partially blocked” in the Sudan. Unfortunately, the link won’t load for me. Nor does the GVO site in general.

Can anyone verify this?

Turkey blocks sites like these wholesale, even if the offender is one single video, then requires their owners to jump through a preposterous number of hoops to get them unblocked. YouTube insists it’s complied and has still not been unblocked.

Additionally, two Turkish free speech sites, Antenna-tr and Ortakpayda, were hacked on July 24th by an ultranationalist group.

Im in Beijing and Youtube.com is unblocked but veoh.com is blocked. Please check this.

Can anyone else confirm?

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Your website is blocked also but i am using a proxy to get it but it doesnt
work with videos.CNET reports that China has unblocked YouTube. They also ask, did Google have a direct hand in the blocking?

Last Friday, YouTube was accessible but anything related to what we called T%%% to avoid filters would return a message to the effect of, “This content is not available in your country.” Though it would be relatively easy for Chinese filters to replicate this result, this may indicate some effort on YouTube/Google’s part. Mama reports that YouTube soon went completely dark, until just now.

Another glitch that emerged, which may suggest some sort of Google involvement, is that when Mama was sending Gmail messages, anything containing the non-redacted T%%%, or even its first three letters, would return an error message she’d never seen, saying that there was an error while sending…The YouTube messages are still vexing. Was YouTube cooperating or was this a very smart error message? To have a Google property that’s not Google China itself cooperating with Chinese censorship would be unprecedented, to my knowledge.

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I’ve created a Committee to Protect Bloggers YouTube account and within that have created a Tibet Protests playlist. I’ve aggregated first-person videos from the protests as well as international news coverage. Please let me know if I’ve missed any substantive ones. I’ll also try to put together playlists for things as they go on, like the Sichuan crackdowns.

This block comes after an attempt to severely curtail all video sharing sites open to Chinese in advance of the upcoming Olympic Games.

Update: Associated Press (via New TeeVee) reports that Pakistan has removed the block that resulted in a worldwide block of the service. The offending video has been removed, of course. It’s an education to realize that one group of people in one country can deprive the entire world of a communications vehicle.

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Update: In a “near global blackout,” the actions of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority managed to bring down all of YouTube for nearly every YouTube user! It’s bad enough when the delicate sensibilities of a government or mob in one country compromises that country’s citizen’s ability to engage in debate. It is simply unacceptable when the censorship activities of one country put the screws to the whole world. Enough already.

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RSF reports that YouTube was blocked Friday by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority for the presence of “non-Islamic objectionable video.”

(T)he PTA, the official Internet regulatory body, ordered all Pakistani ISPs to block access to the website until further notice . . . Don’t Block the Blog, a group of Pakistani bloggers who combat censorship, thinks the blockage order was prompted by two videos. One is anti-Islamic. The other shows voters describing the fraud they witnessed during the parliamentary elections on 18 February, which ended up being won by the opposition Pakistan People’s Party.

We’ve asked our friend Dr. Awab of Don’t Block the Blog for a comment. See below in comments section.

The popular video website YouTube has been blocked in Turkey once more. Several sources quote complaints against a video that insults Atatürk, founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, as the reason for the block. On Friday, internet users in Turkey found the website replaced by a notice saying:

“Access to this web site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2008/55 of T.R. Ankara 12th Criminal Court of Peace.”

A Turkish court issued a similar order in March last year, after a row between Turkish and Greek users escalated and resulted in insults of Atatürk. Internet service providers such as Türk Telekom (the largest and and formerly state-owned ISP) can use the domain name system to put the ban into effect.

It’s unclear what the rationale was for this block. The Wikinews piece also claims the block was in March and was ended after three days. But they seem to have missed the one in September. Have I got this wrong? Can anyone weigh in?

While the statute could limit online video to state-controlled media sites and ban foreign-owned video-hosting sites like YouTube and MySpace, it may also go unenforced, serving more as a threat to coerce video-hosting sites to police themselves. Rather than banning sites like YouTube altogether, says Ben Edelman, a professor at Harvard Business School and an Internet filtering researcher, Beijing’s new rules may be “a shot across the bow.”

This is only the latest measure taken by the Chinese government in this recent cycle of repression. Others include the arrest of blogger and activist Hu Jia, the hijacking of the Beijing Association of Online Media and the increased repression of religious groups.

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Update: ONI has translated the law in question into English.

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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.