War Takes Off On File-Sharing Web Sites

WASHINGTON — Here’s how the Israel-Hezbollah conflict is playing out on the Internet’s latest window into the human experience, YouTube.com: Videos of young girls driving around smoking and joking about Hezbollah, next to shaky footage of grieving men toting dead bodies through rubble as sirens wail. Old propaganda films alongside homemade documentaries about the conflict.Internet video sites such as YouTube became a hit this year as people shared their funny homemade movies with the world. Now the site serves as an unfiltered look at a wide spectrum of experience as rockets and bombs are falling on Israel and Lebanon.In a matter of weeks, YouTube has become a video Dumpster for a global audience to share firsthand reports, military strategies, propaganda videos, and personal commentary about a violent conflict as it unfolds. Anyone can post movies for free, and the site boasts that 100 million videos are watched daily. It is a disorganized bazaar of images that requires visitors to search for a specific topic; searches for both “Hezbollah” and “Israel” yield hundreds of videos, some of them violently graphic, others not so serious.In a message to Hezbollah, a man asks, “I was wondering if you guys have any nuclear bombs, and if so, what are you planning do with it? How’s the war going over there? Do you guys ever go to YouTube.com? Peace.” Another video warns to “proceed with caution” before viewing because it shows a bloodied man who appears to be dead. Some groups have posted gritty black-and-white footage of bombs hitting military targets in Lebanon.Dozens of TV news reports from the Middle East are offered alongside those from the BBC and CNN. Some of the commentary is serious but slightly detached from day-to-day events.A man who goes by “Geeb” posted a video about the conflict showing the sunset near his house in Hawaii, saying, “It’s about time that we live life to the fullest as hard as we can because there aren’t going to be a lot of these sunsets left at the rate things are going.”Others are much more immediately connected to the conflict. Andy Ratto, a 22-year-old American on his birthright trip to Israel, had a video camera last week when he heard rockets outside his hotel in Tiberias, in the north. When his group was told to gather in a hotel bomb shelter, Mr. Ratto filmed the confusion as people gathered in the lobby and as the group sang a peace song while crammed into a windowless room to take cover.

War Takes Off On File-Sharing Web Sites

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