Egyptian protest footage on YouTube

It’s been hard to open a laptop or turn on the television over the last week without hearing news of the unrest in Egypt. On YouTube, thousands of videos of the protests have poured in, whether as unfiltered footage from the demonstrations themselves, or as news reports from our media partners around the globe.

We understand how closely the world is following these events, and want to help people access and share this information quickly and easily on YouTube. We’re helping people do this in three ways:

• Highlighting the latest footage on CitizenTube, our news and politics channel, and inviting people to submit video they’ve come across.
• Pointing our users directly to these videos through banners at the top of YouTube pages, and through links alongside YouTube videos.
• Streaming live coverage of Al Jazeera’s broadcasts about the unfolding events, on both their Arabic and English YouTube channels.

And our Google colleagues have also turned on a speak-to-tweet service to help people in Egypt stay connected at this difficult time.

Here’s a playlist of videos that have come in:



YouTube has used similar tools and live streaming technologies in the past to give our users access to information on major world news events, such as the Haiti earthquake and the protests in Iran. We hope this footage provides a unique window into the events unfolding in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and many other cities across Egypt.

Olivia Ma, YouTube News and Politics, recently watched “28th Jan. 2011 - Storyful - Kasr Al Nile Bridge clashes.”