MySpace Users Revolt Against Murdoch

arclightfire writes "Looks like Murdoch's News International have stired up a revolt within users of the MySpace file-sharing site they purchased for $629m (£355m) last July, reports the Independent; "Angry members of MySpace, the personal file-sharing website for young adults, are accusing Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation of censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites. The 38 million subscribers to MySpace...discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens. The intervention by News Corp in the traditionally open-access world of the web - in particular the alteration of personal user profiles - provoked a storm of angry posts...The protests gathered pace, and when 600 MySpace customers complained and a campaign began to boycott the site and relocate to rival sites such as Friendster, Linkedin, revver.com and Facebook.com, News Corp relented and restored the links.""

Net free?

[baldass_newbie]

Who ever suggested the net was free of censorship?
Seriously.

just a minute

[42Penguins]

Why, again, do we care about the cesspool that is MySpace?

Wouldn't the world actually be a BETTER place if all the users revolted, and the site shut down altogether?

Communities

[suso]

What the Web won't be like in 10 years? (1997) [amazon.com]

So much for corporations being less in control at the hands of the communities.

Way to go, MySpace users!

[standbypowerguy]

This is a perfect example of how to fight commercial censorship... vote with your wallet.

"Freedom of Speech"

[RobotRunAmok]

...belongs to those who own the presses, a fact-of-life with which I suspect Mr. Murdoch is well-acquainted.

"My Space." That's funny.

Re:Net free?

[kentrel]

I wouldn't say the internet was free of censorship, because nothing is, nothing can be. There is a lot of freedom here, but when people sign up to a company's website, especially if its free, they can never really expect much. They are shitty tactics though, and people should respond by taking their business (free or paying) elsewhere.

Re:Way to go, MySpace users!

[nwbvt]

MySpace users have wallets? I thought most of them were 12 year old kids...

The dot com bubble taught us one thing ...

[techstar25]

If the dot com bubble taught us anything, it's that "If it's free on the internet, it's unreliable and fully controlled by somebody who will run it into the ground". I'm costantly telling that to bands who rely on Myspace as their primary website. Very soon, Fox might, and could pull an MP3.com and just pull the plug, leaving thousands (millions?) of bands without a web presence. There also plenty of people who only communicate through myspace, and so when myspace goes, all communication ends, and they lose those friends. These kids who think they have the right to post whatever they want are sadly misinformed, but they are 12 years old (claiming to be 18 of course), so we can't blaim them for their naivety.

Re:Communities

[heavy snowfall]

If they care so much about freedom of speech they should buy themselves a domain and hosting (separately). That way they can change DNS info if their host opresses them :), and the registrars have shown they don't care what you do with the domains anyway.

Stop being so cheap

[Mr.Dippy]

I haven't found one decent looking webpage on MySpace. It seems to be home for teenagers and college students who are too cheap to pay 3 to 10 dollars a month for a hosting company and who still think the blink tag is way cool. If you want freedom of speech and all that other non-sense on the web go get yourself a domain name, pay the few bucks a month for hosting, and a 20 dollar book on HTML. You get what you pay for.

Re:Stop being so cheap

[MrCopilot]

Hey man, are you saying there is no place on the web for broke teens with no skill? My kids aren't paying for a domain out of thier allowance just to say hey. Let MySpace and Friendster and $$$$$$ster take care of a place for these kids to "shout out" to each other. It is free to them and it allows communication in a much more time independent manner than IM. Plus it is another place to store and share their pictures. Why did they get those digital cameras for Christmas?

My hat's off to the MySpace users for thier democratic approach. Sometimes it works, Note to selves though, MURDOCH=FOX=FNC=Very Large Corp=Very Right Republican. Not always the best friend to the youth and their movements.

Easy to keep an eye on things when all on your servers it is.

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJR J8OVF&b=122948 [americanprogress.org]
Who is Rupert Murdoch?

How one right-wing billionaire uses his business and media empire to pursue a partisan agenda at the expense of democracy.

Re:What's with all the Independent lifted stories?

[bri2000]

I do. Gave up on the Guardian following the last election when Polly Toynbee's pro-Blair puff pieces actually started to get offensive (her assertion that anybody who takes the War and the handling of the occupation into account when making their voting decision is 'decadent' and her sudden conversion to PR (which, I suspect, she's never mentioned again) did it for me.)

Re:Shut it down

[MrPerfekt]

Some people choose to buy drugs, some people choose to meet people, some people choose to listen to music, some people choose to....

A social network imitating society.. what are the odds?

Re:Way to go, MySpace users! -- All in Vain

[Compulsion]

McDonald's changed their menu to make money, not because of pressure campaigns. They realized that people were trying to eat healthier, so they give you a nice, healthy bed of lettuce and greens.

Then they pile on some fried chicken and 400calorie dressing. And charge you more by unit weight for it than just about anything else on the menu.

--Compulsion

Re:File Sharing?

[systmoadownfreak]

True that is one of the purposes...ok it's basically the major use of the site, but another feature that it holds is to put up music files of the bands that are listed there. Basically most of the time bands will put a couple of free songs up there to generate interest in them and hopefully actually sell some of their music.

As stupid as I think the censorship of the internet is, it IS the site of the corporation. They can limit what you do on the site.

Oh well, more reason for me to steer clear of the stupid community.

Re:Shut it down

[xoip]

While you're shutting down MySpace make sure you get every other means of communications those Pot Smokers use too...Cell Phones, msn...aol...yahoo...gaim...jabber...personal contact at school...ban them from the shopping mall...play ground...hell you could escort the kid everywhere he goes but I doubt this war on drugs mentality would make anyones life better.

Re:Er...

[Anonymous Coward]

MySpace was once a filesharing site--free online storage site, to be exact, like freedrive, xdrive, idrive, and mydocsonline use to be. They were once used to share Warez and music files.

Re:Net free?

[vertinox]

Who ever suggested the net was free of censorship?

No one said that... The saying goes, "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

Clearly this is one of those times.

Of course, had there never been censorship on the net then there wouldn't be any of this routing.

Re:Shut it down

[Anonymous Coward]

So now, you don't trust him and he doesn't trust you. Sounds like my childhood, I _was_ that kid. Our parents were so fucking nosy and controlling that we would do anything possible to subvert it. My sister was off fucking in the back of cars, and I was smoking weed and dropping acid. I caught my dad listening to sis's phone calls with a linesman's test set (if you clip on to a line, you can hear the conversation), and my mom didn't even need to be caught, she would shamelessly turn our rooms upside down. I just hope you haven't shamed their sexuality in anyway, that really hurts to a teen. I wish you luck, it is a hard raod to travel, and now I have two children of my own as well. I would make sure your kid knows that smoking pot sometimes is OK, but becoming a drug addict is not. Maybe a lesson or two on discretion as well.

Re:Way to go, MySpace users! -- All in Vain

[Pxtl]

You can order the chicken grilled instead of fried.

Re:File Sharing?

[Midnight Thunder]

As stupid as I think the censorship of the internet is, it IS the site of the corporation. They can limit what you do on the site.

What you say it true and I have been modded down to -1 for pointing this out in the past. At the same time trying not to be evil is also a great way of winning people over. When a company takes an anti-social tactic on a social site, then people will get unnerved and feel upset about it. Censorship is a great way of scaring people off, especially if you did not indicate clearly that it was one of the rules of the site.

The other problem is we see companys say one thing and then saying the opposite in the small print. I get fed up with small print licenses that I need a lawyer to decipher. How about providing some of that info in a FAQ?

Re:just a minute

[daviddennis]

I think almost all the pretty, young girls on the Internet are on it. There would be no more pretty girls if you vaporized all myspace users :-(.

True, it shows a remarkable lack of taste in most pretty young girls' minds, but there are always the rare exceptions.

I admire myspace because it gives people what they really want, not what marketers say they want and not what software developers say they want. They want to be able to use any color in the world and they can. They want to put horrible music up on their profiles and so they can.

"People Power" made myspace and people power can destroy it. It looks like Murdoch's people are sending it straight down the tubes.

I hope Tom cashed the check.

D

Re:Stop being so cheap

[thrills33ker]

As a 29-year-old MySpace user and owner of my own domain (in fact I have my own vmware server), may I be the first to invite you to shut the hell up?

You want to set up your own site on your own domain/hosting, go right ahead. Good luck getting any visitors. You want to make contact with new people, communicate with them, set up a virtual social network of people who you can later meet up with in real life, well you need something like MySpace. It's the users, stupid. Oh, and you get to discover cool new bands as well.

And another thing - is the irony of a lot of Slashdot users making fun of a lot of "12-year-old goth" MySpace users lost on everyone but me? I frequent both sites, and let me tell you, MySpace has a LOT more "normal" people on it than Slashdot.

So in summary, shut up.

Re:File Sharing?

[Catbeller]

Ah, bitter old people.

Who's the bigger losers: the people who post on MySpace, or the people who take the time to troll around MySpace for pictures of people to ridicule?

Re:Communities

[Catbeller]

Nope. Only about 600 revolted out of 30 million, firstly. The rest of the crowd never noticed until it hit the news.

And the corporation still won't explain why it censored, or what the criteria for censorship is.

And the corporation deleted the blogs covering the subject. No explanation. One can only conclude that any content that the corporation interprets as objectionable will be deleted, with no notice and no explanation.

A state of terror doesn't exist when everyone is being nailed. It can happen to only a few, and then everyone else learns the lesson, internalizes the fact that they must watch what they say, watch what they do, or SOMEthing might happen. People automagically line up in ranks for very little reason, something Goebbels and Hitler knew well. McCarthy knew how it worked, and so did Nixon and Bush II.

The users are NOT in control there.

Huey Long, I think, once said that fascism would come to America (extend it to the world, same idea), but people would call it democracy. If there's no place to speak, freedom of speech is de facto curtailed, if not dead.

Boots marching, boots marching...

Murdoch was this administration's Hearst. He doesn't enjoy freedom of speech when others are practicing it. He thinks it so precious that he thinks only he can use it safely.

Free market concept: no regulations vs competition

[dada21]

This is a proof of the free market concept of needing no regulations.

Customers of Company A (MySpace) don't get what they want. Company B (and C and D and E, etc) offer a better product. Customers complain, customers change hands. Company A either listens to the mass choice making going on, or they go out of business.

Isn't freedom awesome? Hundreds of thousands of people who don't even know each other are able to make a decision together without actually having to decide on what they want. The desires of the masses is met by open competition, not forced by regulations.

Up until 15 years ago, I could understand the regulations debate. Now that the Internet allows millions (billions) to review companies on a whim (and soon via WAP and SMS), the need to regulate would be better covered by more competition. Regulations raise the cost of entry to a market, decreasing competition, decreasing choice, and increasing prices.

We've attained perfection?

[Neoprofin]

I find it more than slightly humorous that the population of Slashdot is willing to put themselves on a pedistal long enough to bash the users of Myspace. Apparently after I went to bed last night the nerds became the highest class in the social order. They may not bathe, they may all die virgins, but on this day my friend, they can claim they are better than the population of another website.

Before you go speaking in generalizations about everyone who uses is site, even if they are by and large scene kids with poor taste in music who take bad photos, remember that the road goes both ways. There are plenty of useless trolls on Slashdot that you wouldn't want to be judged with, and there are scores of people on Myspace who feel the same way about all the people you're mocking them with.

Re:Shut it down

[Woy]

Your Youngest son's biggest problem is a dad who considers "motorcycle stunts" safer than smoking pot.

Oh, and hacking your son's private stuff is also a great lesson on trust. My father pulled that stunt too and it cost him bitter tears of regret a few years after the fact. I hope your son educates himself on the practical uses of cryptography and cuts you off from his digital life as he probably already did from his "real" life.

Motorcycle Stunts?

[Hershmire]

You'll let one child perform motorcycle stunts and show off to his friends but you won't let your other child buy pot? Am I missing something here? I'd rather my kid smoke a joint than eat through a tube for the rest of his life. Not that I'd like my kids to do drugs, but you get my point.

I'm probably wrong, but

[Hosiah]

I hope people are finally Getting It that if we are to subjugate ourselves entirely to technology, if we are content to surround ourselves with gadgets and gizmos, that than perhaps it's not a good idea to leave every single last scrap of control over technology, from space stations to digital watches, in the hands of about five trillionaires worldwide. Can anybody see a problem there?

Re:Net free?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up.

Re:Er...

[blincoln]

First off, there are more women on the system than men.

I've never been to MySpace, but I know a LOT of girls with Livejournals, versus a handful of guys. I think it's the social aspect.

And yes, if you look at teenagers' livejournals as an aggregate, most of them are pretty similar, because the amount of unique experiences in a teenager's life is generally far outweighed by the normal ones.

Re:just a minute

[The Good Reverend]

Why is this insightful?

Myspace is a social networking site, and is introducing millions of kids to the ability to create their own web sites, code/design, and get online in general. There's a ton of crap there, just like there's a ton of crap on fark, and slashdot, and the internet as a whole. But the elitist "wow, we hate it because it seems shallow to us" attitude is unproductive and mean spirited.