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How Not to Launch a Multilingual Website: Think Flickr, Think

Flickr's greets its global audience with censorship

Flickr's greets its global audience with censorship

This week Flickr greeted its new international audience with a surprise: radical censorship. Originally I planned to write about how wonderful it was that Flickr added multilingual support for seven more languages. I was going to predict that its number of users and photos would quickly explode. That was before Alex clued me into the buzz from the German Flickr community, people who have been blocked from accessing a good chunk of Flickr’s content.

To access all content on Flickr you need to sign in with a Yahoo! ID. And now if you’re Yahoo! ID says you’re from Germany – or Singapore or Hong Kong or Korea – you’re blocked from accessing “moderate” and “restricted” photos. Because of the country you live in.

So what does this mean? See for yourself.

Rather than this:

Luckily Flickr users are all over this. Read what they’re saying (German discussion here) and add your protest photo. Hopefully Flickr and Yahoo will start listening.

Comments
Tough one to crack, are we setting a new open exchange platform?

It is unfortunately a reafirmation of borders on digital platforms opposed to the supposed (and now mostly token) openness that these tools supposedly offered. Are you familiar with the concept of "mumis" at say De Ugarte,? If they don't change we may need to go party elsewhere...

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