Ethical Quandary for Social Sites

[groovedaddy]

Two days after using Flickr to display photos of police officers from Egypt’s feared state security force, Hossam el-Hamalawy watched in disbelief as they vanished, one by one, from the popular social networking site, which he had been using since 2008.

“I thought I was being hacked,” said Mr. el-Hamalawy, a prominent Egyptian blogger and human rights activist who had uploaded the headshots of the police from CDs found by activists early this month at the State Security Police headquarters in Nasr City.

He later learned in an e-mail from Flickr that the photos had been removed because he did not take the images himself, a violation of the site’s community rules.

“That is totally ludicrous,” he said. “Flickr is full of accounts with photos that people did not take themselves.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/business/media/28social.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha25

[bengalherder]

1. He needs to post that stuff in an archive such as wikileaks

or one of the anonymous wikis.

You Tube, flickr, etc are not reliable methods of storage. The anons who put stuff on those sites, do so thru multiple accounts with more socks reposting as material is taken down.