Why The Decision To Make Orkut Watch Blog

The decision basically boils down to one thing which is one the most important value policy issues of our time and day, if not the most important issue - Freedom Of Expression!

Now why would that be?

To people who are not familiar with Orkut this takes a little explanation.

Orkut is an online social community much like Facebook and Myspace but more forum oriented than Facebook and Myspace in my honest opinion, has little or no experience with the latter, many of those forums in Orkut has got political or religious discussion purposes.

However, the Freedom Of Speech issue in online communities is just as controversial as everywhere else, what you can say or not say, either from a political correct dogma or sharia jurisprudence.

Apart from the obvious censorship of content such as moderators banning members there is another way for those with intentions of censorship to remove content they deem 'offensive' for one reason or the other.

One is to report a member's profile or community for 'bogus' which is the Orkut jargon for flagging, which is normally intented to be against pornography, nudity, advertizing and other breaches of the terms and conditions of Orkut - The flagging option is widely abused and highly organized, there are whole communities and for most art consisting of cyberjihadis and who are dedicated to 'flag' profiles speaking of political or ideological content, opposing a religion or an ideology.
To assume that Orkut is capable of following an online social network and forums with 120.000.000 members and case per case with human decision making I can't answer for, but one thing can be presumed and that is that Orkut somehow deletes a profile or a community after x-number of times it has been 'hit' by organized cyberassassination.

Personally I have lost a string of communities and ironically 'War Against Terrorism' twice, 'Support Denmark and Free Speech', 'Ijtehad in Islam' to name a few, friends of mine has lost communities such as 'Freedom of speech on Orkut?'.

On the other hand you will find communities in support for Taliban, Al Qaeda, The Muslim Brotherhood, Death to Denmark, Death to the cartoonists, Death to India, Death to Israel and in other varieties on those and similar subjects.

It feels like book burning when you lose a community and the same thing when your profile gets deleted, hundreds if not thousands of posts and topics, material, research on a whole range of issues, valuable discussions etc, lost.

This losens the resistance to hateful ideologies, extremism, jihadist recruitment, spread of propaganda, attacks on western institutions and values etc. one-sided censorship is indeed a real danger to freedom of expression and speech, it will only help to promote and aggravate extremism.

When that is set in contrast to the hate full communities which is allowed to exist and also for the arguable reason that western minded online debaters do not bother flag a forum or community on freedom of speech grounds, and certainly not in organized flaggings in the thousands flagging out communities and profiles 'singled' out.
Each political or religious oriented forum has got 'watch-dogs' which singles out 'profiles' for 'cyberassassination' on various grounds of 'justified' opinions, other communities are under subjugation to sharia jurisprudence or heavily moderated from a 'Political Correct dogma' with all which follows of censoring of 'content' and 'thought'.

True, you can make a new profile and continue to use your freedom of expression but each time a profile is deleted a 'book-burning' follows which is that each post, thread and topic are deleted forever - Censoring of 'thought' and 'expression'.

This is not unique to Orkut, the same organized censorship of 'content' is known from YouTube, which is ironically owned by Google, one could be tempted to questioning the credibility and liability of Google as a search engine.

All this I intent, with others to expose for the public, because we are only a few voices among 120 million members of Orkut, and the task is far from being one afternoon's surf.

Being clever on the Orkut book-burning feature much have to be found on information, the communities lost is a fate shared with thousands upon thousands other members of Orkut.

The intentions is to expose the ugly rise in Anti-Semitism, spreading of hateful ideologies, death threats to members on Orkut, hate communities and communities dedicated to censor content and prevent freedom of expression.

We are many who have written Orkut to no avail.

This is intended to be expose as well.

Stay beautiful.

[This topic and other topics will be frequently updated.]