Social media had quite a bit to say about Ellen DeGeneres’s defense this week of her friendship with George W. Bush after images of them chumming it up at a Packers-Cowboys football game got attention over the weekend.
“During the game they showed a shot of George and me laughing together and people were upset. They thought, ‘Why is a gay Hollywood liberal sitting next to a conservative Republican president?’” said Ellen in the monologue.
One critic of the friendship, activist Rafael Shimunov, created a blistering video of Ellen’s monologue in defense of the friendship backed with images from the Iraq war era. Ellen’s team began trying to have the clips removed from Twitter, but that may be backfiring.
Business Insider reports: “In response, users have started re-uploading the video on Twitter, arguing that Shimunov’s editing was a form of commentary and therefore fair use under copyright law. On Wednesday, Shimunov said the re-uploads had garnered a collective 300,000 views, though some have also since been taken down due to copyright complaints. The move to thwart DeGeneres’ attempts to scrub the video from the internet is an example of the ‘Streisand Effect’ — an internet phenomenon in which attempting to block or censor information or media can have the reverse effect of making it more popular and introducing it to people who would not have otherwise seen it.”
The clip is still available on YouTube.
