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Egypt: Activist's Flickr Account Censored

Categories: Middle East & North Africa, Egypt, Digital Activism, Freedom of Speech, Human Rights, Photography, Protest, Technology

Egyptian activists are screaming foul after Flickr resorted to ‘censoring’ their accounts on the photo sharing network.

Journalist, blogger and activist Hossam El Hamalawy writes [1]:

“I had noticed that some of my recent pix from Ireland, that included the Palestine and the Republican murals were not viewable to the public unless they were signed in. I emailed the Flickr Gods. They were kind enough to respond back quickly and un-flag some of the pix, putting them on “safe” mode, but without giving me an explanation why they were flagged in the first place.
The only reason I can think of is an editorial anti-Palestinian bias”

After exchanging a couple of mails with Flickr, he is still waiting for a satisfactory answer:

“I still haven’t received a reply from them about why my Ireland photos were censored in the first the place, or about changing the above.
I have to say I’m disgusted and I’m in need of your solidarity to get my flickr account back its “safe” mode, so that search engines can find it”

Hamalawy threatened that he would migrate to another service because he simply is not going to remove the strike and demonstration pictures, some of which have been contributed by other photographers, from his account [2].

Nora Younes [3] supported Hamalawy and threatened to migrate as well.

She writes:

“If flickr case 982056 is not promptly solved; I – a 3 years FlickrPro user, photojournalist, and internationally recognized human rights activist- will migrate too.”

Nora who has recently been awarded the HRF award [4]expressed her disapproval [5] of censoring Hamalawy's account:

“free speech is now struggling several battlefields: Twitter suspended their services in Egypt. In 2007, YouTube suspended Wael Abbas’ channel while his facebook page was recently deleted. And now flickr is censoring Hossam el-Hamalawy. Instead of the growing dependency on those companies we need to develop our own Arab Social Networks”

In another development, Hamalawy reports about the censoring of activist Wael Abbas’ Flickr account as well.

Oh great… They first disabled [6] his YouTube [7] channel [8], and now Facebook deleted Wael’s account.. [9]