The clip 'they' tried to ban

Firstly I'd like to point out that I'm not sure who 'they' are but everyone loves a good whodunnit. This mystery all started when EBC Radio Wales decided to run a segment on Llanelli and the upcoming general election campaign.

In the segment they speak to Rebecca Davies, the editor of the Llanelli Star who gives a brutal and honest assessment of how she sees the campaign in Llanelli. Namely that Plaid Cymru are far more active in the town centre. They are engaging more with the traders and backing their campaigns for free parking and business rates. They are getting more support from her readers and they are "pretty much dominating" social media.

The presenter then hits the streets and the market as we get several interviews with the traders and the public. And almost all of them either lay the boot in to Labour, the status quo (Llanelli has a Labour MP, Labour AM and Carmarthenshire has a Labour led council) or are positive about Plaid Cymru.

The clip ends with the Star's editor saying we are starting to see the emergence of a very strong Plaid and despite the fact that Llanelli has historically been a Labour stronghold (93 years) she does expect it to be very close.

So it was no surprise that the local Plaid Cymru candidate (Vaughan Williams) and his team started sharing the clip. I myself also shared the clip via Vaughan's Sound Cloud account. For those that are not aware Sound Cloud is a platform for sharing audio files and when you include the link in your tweets it embeds the audio file so you can listen to it without having to click through.

This is where it gets interesting. A twitter user (and local Red Tory) by the name of @RosemaryEmery tagged another twitter user in the tweet. Guess who the other user was? It was @RebeccaALDavies who most of you should be able to guess is the editor of the Llanelli Star.

Archived copy of the tweet

It wasn't just my tweet that had this either, another user @Bowen1994 also tweeted the audio clip and his tweet also received a whole lot of Rosey's attention as this was also flagged  tagged for @RebeccaALDavies' attention. The time stamps reveal this was done at the same time (1:21pm although if you check the archived version it will show 5:21am but that is down to the time difference between the land of sospan and wherever the archive website is based. Somewhere 'wester' but not 'bester'.

Archived copy of the tweet

Shortly after this happened the clip was removed from Sound Cloud. I want to pause here and reiterate that I am not accusing the local Red Tories of colluding with the editor of a newspaper in order to have a clip of something she said voluntarily pulled from the internet. But it is an interesting turn of events.

And that pretty much sums it up...

That wasn't strictly true just now, that's not all I have. I do have a back up I lifted from the original Sound Cloud as you probably might have guessed from the inclusion of the video above. You see once something has hit the internetz it's quite difficult to remove it, just ask Babs.

I decided to create my own video and distribute copies so that other people have backup copies and can distribute it also. It's only a simple video for now, there are so many great sound bites in the clip that I may make something a little better if I get the chance. Or if there is anyone out there who can do something more polished then feel free to get in touch. But for now, let's just see how long this clip stays on the internetz

Should there be any take down notices then I will include them on here as well as a link to where I add the next video I upload


Here is the video link.

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