Flicker Accused of Enforcing Its Community Rules Unethically

Only a couple days after a user has uploaded few pictures at Flickr, just like any other of its huge number of users. The pictures which showed the Egyptian police officers in a much feared state, uploaded by Hossam el-Hamalawy, well-known Egyptian blogger and human rights activist, could not believe it when he first saw the pictures ‘vanished’ one after another, from the networking site.

He later claimed that “I thought I was being hacked.” Hamalawy has been a very active user of the networking social website since 2008 and uploaded these pictures just early this month, which have been shot at the State Security Police headquarters in Nasr City.

He informed that later he finally learned through an e-mail letter sent by Flickr team; explain that the photos were removed because he, the user, did not take those images himself. The mail stated that this reason lies in violation of the site’s community rules. Hamalawy commented on this e-mail message to say “That is totally ludicrous.” Later he humbly made his point while accusing Flicker: “Flickr is full of accounts with photos that people did not take themselves.”

Since the social media websites become more and more used by activists and pro-democracy forces especially in the Middle East and North Africa, it has put these companies in a difficult position: how to contain this highly growing use for political, which appear neutral as they only maintain the practices and policies which made these services popular in the first place.

Ebele Okobi-Harris, the director of the business and human rights program at Yahoo, owned by Flickr, discussed with the media that Mr. el-Hamalawy’s photos exemplify the challenges faced while balancing the existing rules and terms of service for users with the new ways that activists are using these tools.

 “As the uses of these social networks evolve, we have to start thinking about how to create rules or how to apply rules that also facilitate human rights activists using these tools,” she said.

According to Mr. el-Hamalawy, he said that the decision of Flickr for bringing down those photos from the website did not only leave him irritated and angry but also terrified. “Everyone knew that I had released those photos,” he said. “Then the photos were gone. I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking that at any minute, they were going to come for me.” Later that evening Flickr got a help from the loosely affiliated group of activist computer hackers, who mentored him into using another product, Picasa, Google’s photo system, to present the photos of the security police.

“I thought it was a good platform,” he spoke while discussing about flicker and then said that “Now, for me, it is an unethical platform, and I would not recommend it to anyone.”