Too Hot for YouTube M.I.A. Video Leads to Surge of Publicity for M.I.A.

I was going to try to explain the situation around M.I.A.’s “Born Free” video, but Charli Carpenter’s economical explanation is better than mine:

Just a day after it was released earlier this week, the unnervingly violent anti-genocide music video, “Born Free,” was reportedly deleted by YouTube. Actually, as Wired has confirmed, it was only “buried” to make it much harder to find. But the video was simply posted on Vimeo and other sites, and the outrage over the “censorship” caused a viral response, such that the hit rate over the last few days has meant a version of it is again nearing the top of search lists on YouTube. In effect, the Internet has “routed around” this problem.

The interesting thing, of course, is that as is often the case this effort at semi-censorship has only made the video higher-profile than it otherwise would have been. Meanwhile, I’m actually a little bit surprised its taken M.I.A. this much time to land herself in a controversy of this sort—she’s always seemed to me to be deliberately pushing past the boundaries of acceptable discourse in order to get attention.