Censorship Sucks

An awful lot of criticism has been running around the internets today about censorship. Apparently a good chunk of international flickrites including Germans can no longer access anything but photos designated "safe mode" by Flickr.

 

I'll be brief here.

 

Censorship sucks.

 

At yesterday's big Yahoo business annual meeting thing Yahoo rejected an anti-censorship proposal submitted by their shareholders. This was wrong. Yahoo already has a black eye over it's helping to jail Chinese journalist Shi Tao.

 

Part of the proposed anti-censorship proposal presented to Yahoo would have required that they not host data in countries who endorse censorship. In light of what happened to Shi Tao, this would seem to make some sense.

 

Anyways, as CEO of Zooomr, today Kristopher Tate and I made a decision for Zooomr to formally adopt the anti-censorship shareholder proposal that Yahoo rejected. It's a small thing really. We are just a small little photo sharing site, we're not big like Flickr, but it seemed like the right thing to do and it has us putting our money where our mouth is with regards to censorship.

 

We think it makes good business sense to oppose censorship, but more significantly it is the right and ethical thing to do.

Done