YouTube and Google have left a long trail of censorship behind them as they grew ever larger, and more often than not, the companies' images had to suffer because of it, after the media caught wind of the facts. In December, lawyer Robert Amsterdam, representing the jailed Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has posted a clip on the video sharing site, allegedly depicting violence and abuse in the Yekaterinburg prisoner camp.
After being covered on the 12th of February by The Wall Street Journal,
the video was removed by YouTube moderators for reasons unknown. It took a lot of protests for it to go back online, yesterday, and has found, because of the removal, an even wider audience. The movie, said to have been discovered by Lev Ponomarev, the co-founder of the Moscow-based Foundation for Defense of Rights of Prisoners, is embedded below, but I must warn you that the images inside depict violence taken to the extreme.
Debuting with what seems to be an endless parade of soldiers armed with clubs and guns (and also a few K-9 units), the clip shows how unarmed and stripped down to their skin prisoners are being beaten up. Crying and begging does not help, it only looked to make the aggressors even more angry. While a large number of people are on their knees and pushed together along the walls, some unlucky ones are pulled out of their ranks and made to lean, legs spread and face down, against a table, while several soldiers hit them with the standard issued rubber club over their shoulders, legs, and, when they try to cover the hurt areas up, over their hands.
When the movie was removed and all the buzz started, a YouTube spokesman said that: "We are committed to preserving YouTube as an important platform for expression of all kinds, while also ensuring that the site remains a safe environment for our users." As far as I recall, that's their standard policy with different types of videos. Somehow it would have been normal to overlook the rule when it comes to abuse. In November last year, the Google-owned video sharing service banned an anti-torture activist.
Once again, the video is NSFW and people who think they are sensible to violence should not play it.
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