MySpace Asshattery

News Corp doesn't get it. It's really that simple. The company that purchased MySpace apparently doesn't like the freedoms associated with the web, and enacted a campaign of censorship that seriously pissed off many MySpace users.

The censorship took the form of a systematic attempt to get rid of YouTube references. YouTube is an online video service, like Flickr for videos, that many MySpace members have been using to embed videos in their pages. News Corp didn't much care for this, and modified user profiles to remove YouTube content.

This angered some MySpace users so much that a number of them formed a group on MySpace opposing the censorship. Guess what... that group was deleted as well.

Recently, however, the YouTube blog pointed out that they had been in contact with MySpace, and that the fiasco was "a simple misunderstanding, and MySpace has re-enabled all YouTube embeds." Yeah, right... a "simple misunderstanding." Chances are that MySpace is on the verge of releasing some type of video functionality that would compete with YouTube. But that's no excuse, particularly if their users are flocking to YouTube. You have to listen to your users...

So News Corp has clearly demonstrated a couple things through this incident:

1.) They can't communicate well with their own users
2.) The organization is willing to censor content on MySpace
3.) The organization doesn't understand the open nature of the web

And I'm sure the list goes on and on... This was a bad move, no matter how you slice it.

Link via Adrants.