Recently Lebron James was dunked on by Xavier University Jordan Crawford at James’ Skills Academy in Akron, Ohio, and Nike tried to stop video from getting out.

The problem for James and Nike is that they forgot that we live in a world of Flip Cameras, cell phone cameras and plenty of ways to capture and disseminate video without professionals. Sure, Nike was able to stop professional videographers from sharing video by confiscating their video, but silencing professional media outlets isn’t a good way to stop information from being disseminated.

In many ways, the rise of citizen media is allowing for a greater defense of the First Amendment and freedom of expression. Now would be censors have to realize that it’s not easy — if not near impossible — to stop every single citizen from documenting what they witness. We’ve seen this in China, Iran and other parts of the world.

Stories will be told with or without traditional media outlets. In fact, citizen journalists are willing to show far great portrales of the world (citizen journalists don’t know or care about the Rice Krispies test). Instead of often sensitized Western media reports, citizen journalism is willing to show us the horrors of oppression and civil unrest.

Instead of actually stopping information from flowing, governments and, in this case, large corporations merely paint themselves as overbearing censors and bad guys. Sure, Iran, China and Nike were able to stop professional reports but they were miserable at stopping citizen journalists.

What did Nike end of accomplishing? They created a monster out of a rather pedestrian dunk in a pick-up game (check out the dunk yourself). They sullied their own good name and the name of Lebron James. And, of course, the video of the dunk got out anyway.

Twitter users seem to agree that the hype around the dunk was way bigger than the dunk itself:

realhiphopfan88 lebron should never have hid that video the uproar was worse than the actual dunk he made it more of a big deal than it really was smh

LouisburgCoach The craze is over & the video is out: Lebron James gets dunked on. Hyped WAY too much but…http://bit.ly/Uz0lr

Watts4 Ok yea LeBron got dunked on but It wasn’t as bad as they made it seem! It was kinda weak to me….

a_jucks @OGOchoCinco did you see the “dunk” over lebron?? why did they make a big deal about that? it wasnt that bad..

Guruofsports just saw the Lebron gettin yammed on it wasnt that bad.. damn somebody dnt kno how to take a L

DjFonzie I can’t believe all the hype over the lebron dunk.

Now both China and Iran are totalitarian regimes that afford their citizens few rights by Western standards. They are often censoring media — particularly foreign media — because they don’t want their often grotesque acts of oppression being noticed. And a large part of running a totalitarian regime is controlling the flow of information.

In Nike’s case, they turned something that was barely news or not news at all into a major story in the sports world. They also hurt the reputation of one of their biggest stars.

And for what? I don’t know. What I do know, is that Nike shows us that there are plenty of big corporations out there who don’t get how social media and citizen journalism work.

I think traditional journalists should take this to heart. Would be censors may begin to realize that censorship is futile in the age of citizen journalism. That realization may never come, but I do know that censorship just got a whole lot more difficult.