Internet & Democracy Blog

Not (or not only) through sharing information on censorship tactics. Instead, as a mapping of the .ir domain by the firm Lumeta found, “one router in the .ir domain that passes the most traffic is physically located in Russia. Iran is apparently outsourcing a significant portion of its routed infrastructure.” This implies that Russia could also cut off that information, through that ‘choke point,’ if it wanted. According to Information Week, Lumeta also found that only about 10% of US-based traffic into Iran is blocked.

Lumeta also has a map of the Internet in the Middle East.

Which you can compare to our map and study of the Arabic blogosphere.

Hat Tip: Middle East Studies at Harvard

The summer months of 2009 have already played host to game-changing elections in the world’s largest Hindu and Shiite Muslim nations, India and Iran respectively. On July 8, Indonesia – the world’s fourth-largest by-population nation, the world’s largest Muslim country as well as largest Muslim democracy– will hold its presidential elections.

On July 8, Demokrat party incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono will face off against the incumbent Vice President Jusuf Kalla, now the Golkar party presidential nominee, and against 2001-2004 Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, also daughter of Indonesia’s first President Sukarno. Megawati is the leader of the opposition party known as Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan, or PDI-P. Her controversial career soldier running mate, Prabowo Subianto, is the son-in-law of Suharto and the well-heeled founder and former Presidential nominee of the Gerinda party.

30-day domestic relative data on most popular candidate terms

While the perennial elite continues to vie for Indonesia’s top office, political engagement is moving from the streets to the information superhighway. Despite religious differences, the most salient non-domestic interest in the Iranian elections came from Jakarta, where –according to Google Insights for Search– Indonesian (Bahasa) trailed only Persian as the language of choice for entering Google search queries on Iranian presidential candidates. Outside of Iran and its diaspora, Indonesian interest in Iranian politics underscores religious trans-national solidarity, and an increasingly politically active youth demographic.

Within Indonesia, primary interest during the Iranian elections of early June stemmed from Internet users in the Javanese cities of Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Bandung, and Surabaya, and in the Sumatran capital of Medan. Prior to the July 8 Indonesian elections, increased online circumspection in these cities could impact domestic voting patterns. Though Internet penetration in Indonesia is low, limited to 13M –or 5.4 percent of its 240M people– its use is strong in young demographics, evidenced not least by the fact that seven of the 90-day Indonesian top-ten growth Google search terms relate to Facebook or Friendster.

Indonesia is an immensely diverse and complex country comprised of a rich history, and 922 inhabited islands, each multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and multi-religious. Internet penetration is not ubiquitous, its use is not widespread across demographics, and Internet Service Providers are centralized predominately in hub cities.

Even accounting for such gaps, understanding the use of new online media such as search, social networks, and micro-blogging adds a necessary –if not sufficient– layer of analytical firepower for deciphering trends. One week before Indonesian presidential elections, search volume data yields interesting information. While incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono leads by 10 points according to a June 11 poll, aggregated search on iterations of his name –“sby,” “boediono,” “budiono,” “pd” (after his party)– show him leading by 6:1 over Megawati, and by even wider margins over former Vice Presidential incumbent Jusuf Kalla. Putative opinion in Indonesia is that “Mega” –as she is known– is out of the running. In certain regions such as Jawa Timur (East Java) “SBY” leads both in search and in political stronghold. Online “Mega” appears competitive until one realizes that predominate queries are, by “Breakout” proportions, “say no Megawati.”

Top Megawati search terms in Indonesia over last 90 days

But illustrative online activity must be conjoined with offline knowledge. Coupled with an understanding of demography, geography, language, religion, and domestic influence, the political application of this data can be at a minimum indicative of desultory intrigue, but potentially a leading indicator of alteration in public opinion. It must be understood in the context of its influence on domestic social and political institutions. Only if being informed translates to being influential, and only if political will moves from router box to ballot box, will those observations made online be indicative of likely political change. With the most recent polls indicating a spread in public opinion of no more than 10 points, should relative online search volume be correlated with votes cast, Presidential incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono will be re-elected, and the Indonesia of next Wednesday won’t look all that different from the Indonesia of today.

By Dmitry Epstein, Karina Alexanyan and Bruce Etling

The Public Opinion Foundation (or Фонд Общественное Мнение in Russian) recently released a new report from their quarterly series Internet in Russia (started in 2002) which places discussions of the booming Russian language internet in context and allows for both domestic and international comparisons. A few key themes emerge from the report. One is the significant disparity between Moscow and the rest of Russia. Another is the impact of socio-economic factors – age, education and income – on internet use in Russia and around the world.

The report (PDF in Russian), co-sponsored with the Russian search engine giant Yandex, is based on a massive nationwide survey of 42,000 respondents and 8000 face to face interviews, conducted in the first quarter of 2009. The report provides data and charts on internet penetration in Russia nationwide, as well as breakdowns by region, places of access and various socio- economic factors. The data is presented in numerous charts and graphs, including growth and changes since the reports began in 2002.

Russia Compared to the Rest of the World
Russia’s current internet penetration of 33% can be compared to Brazil’s (which is at around 29%), most of Europe (around 60%) and the US (70%). At the same time, internet penetration in Moscow is currently at European levels. As a comparison, in the US, internet penetration was at 35% in 1998 (remember the internet euphoria of 1998?) and reached 60% in 2004.

From another angle – Russia’s 33% internet penetration adds up to almost 38 million internet users – more than all of England’s internet users, yet far less than the US’s 200 million internet users (which is more than the entire population of Russia) and China’s 298 million. Moscow alone has 5.4 million internet users.

Another issue to consider is what constitutes a “user”. According to this report, anyone who has used the internet in the last six months qualifies. How would you define an internet “user” – at least once a week? Once a day? Weekly users in Russia number around 30 million or 27%, and daily users shrink to 20 million, or 18%. Again, in Moscow the figure is drastically different – 92% of Moscow’s users go online at least once a week, and 80% - over 4 million people – are online every day.

Moscow vs. the Regions
The disparity between Moscow and the “rest of Russia” becomes clearer when one looks at the regional data. Moscow has 8% of the country’s population, 14% of its average internet users and 25% of Russia’s daily internet users! The Central region, which includes Moscow, has 28% of the population and 32% of the internet users - almost 12 million people in all. The Northwest region, which includes St. Petersburg, has 10% of the population and 13% of the internet users- almost 5 million people in all (while an impressive 50% of those in St. Petersburg are online, demonstrating the importance of the urban-rural divide when looking at the regional data.) In the remaining 5 regions, the percent of internet users is generally slightly less than the percentage of the total population. The Volga region, for example, has 22% of the national population, but only 19% of its internet users – which is still over 7 million people.

Internet Users by Russian Region (Source: FOM Report)

These numbers highlight the danger of extrapolating from Moscow to “all of Russia.” Moscow holds a central position as the nucleus of political and economic power in Russia, but it certainly does not represent the country as a whole.

Internet Growth Impressive
While a national internet penetration of about one third may not seem very impressive – the rate of growth has been steady and exponential, especially in the areas outside Moscow. So, for example, during the seven years between 2002 and 2009, the percentage of internet users in Moscow more than doubled from 27% to 60%. During that same period, in most of the rest of the country, the pace of growth was even faster, with the percentage of internet users increasing almost six fold– from around 5% to around 30%. As a comparison, in the US during that same time period – 2002 to 2009, internet penetration increased only 10%. The US was experiencing Russian type growth during the heady 1990’s. In addition, the place of internet access has shifted dramatically, with far more people (almost 80%) going online at home, rather than at work or other locations (friend’s, internet cafes, school etc - the categories, are, of course, not mutually exclusive). In 2002, only 32% went online at home, while the number of people going online at work dropped from 41% in 2002 to 34% in 2009. This could be attributed to improvements to the quality of internet connections at home, and the increase in personal land lines, or other forms of access.

Who’s Online (and Who’s Not)
Socio-economic demographics – gender, age, education and income – contribute to the sense of an “internet boom.” In Russia, as elsewhere in the world, the higher the income and education, the higher the rate of internet access & use. The percentage of internet users with advanced degrees (about 17% of the total population) is significantly above average – about 65%. For roughly 70% of the population, those with a secondary education and a high school diploma, internet penetration is at or below the national average – from 33% to 24%. And of the remaining 12%, only 5% are internet users. In other words, for the relatively elite, it may seem that virtually everyone they know is online. For others, the internet may appear as a “luxury item” or even something that has no significant relevance to daily life.

In terms of internet use, Russia has achieved the gender equality much touted in Soviet times – the split between male and female users is roughly at 50%. This is especially interesting compared to users globally, where men are usually a significantly higher number of users, especially in the Middle East. In some areas, there are more male users than females, in others, the females outnumber the men. The average Russian blogger for instance, is female. This may be connected to the fact that women slightly outnumber men in Russia.

“Working woman are actively involved in all aspects of working and social life of the country!”

The breakdown of internet users by age reflects the usual assumptions – the younger age group (18-24) which accounts for only 14% of the population, has the highest internet penetration at 67%. In Moscow, as elsewhere, internet penetration decreases with age, but to a much lesser degree than in other parts of Russia. It is also interesting that while in the early part of this decade most users gained access to the Internet at work, now the vast majority (almost 80%) prefer to access the Internet at home.

Finally, as a sobering counterbalance to all this, it seems, from the report, that most of the people who are offline do not have any plans to change their status in the near future - in other words, less than 3% of those who are not online plan to start using the internet anytime soon. Maybe they have something else – like an economic crisis - on their minds?

(Hat Tip: Veronica Khokhlova, Global Voices Russia Editor)

By John Kelly and Bruce Etling

While Twitter is getting a lot of attention in the current Iranian crisis, it’s good to know that the robust Iranian blogosphere also remains active in the face of the government’s interference with the Internet. The figure below shows new blog posts on blogfa.com, the dominant Iranian blogging platform, over the past three weeks. While some Blogfa users are outside Iran, the vast majority are inside. We can see significant, through sporadic, disruption of Iranian blogging for a period of about two and a half days beginning a day after the disputed election. After that, posting returns to roughly pre-election levels.

What are bloggers talking about? A scan of text reveals high levels of discussion about politics. Many bloggers continue to link to websites supporting Mousavi (such as mirhussein.com), whereas linking to the main site supporting Ahmadinejad  emtedadmehr.com) has nearly stopped, including among conservative political bloggers.

One harrowing story lately has been how the Revolutionary Guards have been posting pictures of protesters and asking readers to identify them. Perhaps hearteningly, the Guards’ site for this, gerdab.ir, is being linked to by a relative handful of bloggers [gerdab.ir map below], even among the conservative bloggers who mainly support Ahmadinejad. In fact, the site is being linked to by reformist bloggers, presumably calling out the practice, at nearly the same rate as the conservatives.

As for Twitter, we see a dramatic rise in the number of Iranian bloggers linking to Twitter in the first 15 days after the election [first map below], as compared to the same period a month earlier [second map below]. Interestingly, this linking is localized to a cluster of the map featuring longstanding opposition (as opposed to merely “reformist”) and expatriate bloggers. As we showed in our paper last year, this is also the portion of the map that is most frequently filtered by the Iranian government.

The Berkman-affiliated Web Ecology project, lead by the Internet & Democracy’s own Tim Hwang, has done some amazing and very timely research on Twitter in Iran. This adds some more quantitative data to our Op-Ed in the Post last week. The key findings:

* From 7 June 2009 until the time of publication (26 June 2009), we have recorded 2,024,166 tweets about the election in Iran.
* Approximately 480,000 users have contributed to this conversation alone.
* 59.3% of users tweet just once, and these users contribute 14.1% of the total number.
* The top 10% of users in our study account for 65.5% of total tweets.
* 1 in 4 tweets about Iran is a retweet of another user’s content.

You can download the full PDF report here.

From Kamangir, who tell us this has been posted on a number of major Iranian blogs:

Statement by a group of Iranian bloggers about the Presidential elections and the subsequent events

1) We, a group of Iranian bloggers, strongly condemn the violent and repressive confrontation of Iranian government against Iranian people’s legitimate and peaceful demonstrations and ask government officials to comply with Article 27 of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Constitution which emphasizes “Public gatherings and marches may be freely held, provided arms are not carried and that they are not detrimental to the fundamental principles of Islam.”

2) We consider the violations in the presidential elections, and their sad consequences a big blow to the democratic principles of the Islamic Republic regime, and observing the mounting evidence of fraud presented by the candidates and others, we believe that election fraud is obvious and we ask for a new election.

3) Actions such as deporting foreign reporters, arresting local journalists, censorship of the news and misrepresenting the facts, cutting off the SMS network and filtering of the internet cannot silence the voices of Iranian people as no darkness and suffocation can go on forever. We invite the Iranian government to honest and friendly interaction with its people and we hope to witness the narrowing of the huge gap between people and the government.

A part of the large community of Iranian bloggers

July 26, 2009

As a follow-up to last week’s release of our study on the shape of the Arabic blogosphere, happy to post today that Internet and Democracy’s own John Palfrey, Bruce Etling, and Rob Faris have recently published a piece in the Washington Post about the use of Twitter in Iran’s recent election turmoil. Drawing from our previous research here at I&D and some of the latest data that’s being pulled from the use of social media on the ground in Iran, we write:

After all, it appears that people living under authoritarian regimes such as the one in Iran are as addicted to the Internet as the rest of us are. Even though states push back, they can’t keep the Internet down for long without serious blowback from their citizens. Iranian officials have the power to shutter the Internet just as they once clamped down on reformist newspapers, but they may be more concerned now about any move that pushes those watching — or blogging or tweeting — from the sidelines into the throngs of protesters already in the streets.

Definitely worth checking out!

After much work over the past year, the Internet and Democracy Project team is proud to officially announce today the release of our study on the Arabic blogosphere, a follow-up to last year’s I&D study on the shape of the Iranian blogosphere. Our research identified a base network of approximately 35,000 blogs, and aimed to generate a baseline for understanding the state of online discourse in the region. As in our previous work, we’ve worked with John Kelly to visualize the data on over 6,000 of the most connected blogs and had researchers read over 4,000 blogs to understand who the bloggers are and the issues they care about. We’re excited to report that there’s some intriguing findings on the state of the networked public sphere in the Middle East, some highlights include:

* The Demographics of Arab Bloggers: Demographic coding indicate that Arabic bloggers are predominately young and male. The highest proportion of women is found in the Egyptian youth sub-cluster, while the Maghreb/French Bridge and Syrian clusters have the highest concentration of men.

* The Makeup of the Arab Online Media Ecosystem: Bloggers link to Web 2.0 sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia (both English and Arabic versions) more than other sources of information and news available on the Internet. Al Jazeera is the top mainstream media source, followed by the BBC and Al Arabiya, while US-government funded media outlets like Radio Sawa and Al Hurra are linked to relatively infrequently.

* The Perception of the United States: The US is not a dominant political topic in Arabic blogs; neither are the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. However, when the US is discussed, it is nearly always in critical terms.

There’s much more here — our study revealed other interesting patterns in the online discussion around extremism, and the online presence of political opposition groups, including Kefaya (Enough) and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

You can get the complete study here. Also be sure to check out our event tomorrow at USIP where John Palfrey, John Kelly, Robert Faris and Bruce Etling will present the results and get reaction from a panel of experts and bloggers from the region. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Cross-posted on the ONI Blog

The Internet and mobile phones have taken on a major role in Iranian politics over the last several months. As protests over the contested election results continue in Iran, the government has dramatically increased its control over digital technologies. Many important Web sites have been blocked over the past couple of days, including the Web sites of the opposition parties in Iran, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. While political organizers have learned to leverage the organizing power of Web 2.0 tools, government censors in Iran are quick to shut them down when they are most effective. None of this is surprising; it reflects similar events seen in many places around the world.

Digital tools have been shown to be effective political organizing tools, from the Obama presidential campaign in the US to Ukraine, Colombia and Moldova. As powerful as new technologies may be as political tools, information and communication technologies have also been proven to be exceedingly fragile; in countries where the government has sufficient latitude to interfere with the use of these tools, they are easily disrupted and if necessary, can be shut down entirely.

The role of information and communication technologies in Iranian politics has matured rapidly over the past year. Political opposition groups in particular have adopted new online and mobile phone-based organizing tactics, using Facebook, Twitter, Web sites, email, cell phones and SMS and the full suite of Web 2.0 tools as mechanisms for political organizing. This is has all taken place in a highly restrictive media environment in which the Internet and other forms of digital communication are intensely regulated. Facebook has been blocked and unblocked several times in the past year. The rationale and legal justifications for censoring Internet communications are broad. Anything construed as anti-Islamic or damaging to the Iranian state can be blocked by what amounts to executive fiat, although there are many voices within the institutions charged with blocking web sites in Iran.

Earlier reports that the government shut down the Internet entirely during the June 12 elections appear to be exaggerated. Jim Cowie at Renesys looked at the evidence from international routing data and indeed found evidence of some strange events in Iran’s traffic to the outside.

However, the Internet is still up in Iran, though reports from inside Iran suggest that it is much slower than normal and a broader range of websites are being blocked. The fact that Iran has invested so much in blocking Internet content might mean that they have greater confidence about keeping tight controls over content available in Iran without shutting down the Internet entirely, as Burma had done in the face of popular protests there.

After a large surge in SMS traffic in the run-up to the election, multiple sources inside Iran reported that the country’s SMS networks went down just nine hours before the polls opened. This is unsurprising, as SMS has been used in many places as a powerful tool for organizing protests. Reporters Without Borders reports that the SMS take-down was part of attempt to prevent opposition supporters from collecting election results.

By Saturday, all mobile phone services had been shut off in Tehran. Plans by an organization led by former president Rafsanjani to carry out election monitoring using cell phones might have factored into this decision. Cell phone service was restored on June 14, but SMS continues to be blocked.

Western media sources have covered the news as it unfolds, although some US media outlets have been criticized for not focusing more attention on the events in Iran. The government has not thrown western journalists out of the country, though it has made reporting difficult. The BBC has traced the jamming of one of its satellites, which has interrupted access to radio and television for audiences in Iran, the Middle East and Europe, to a location inside Iran.

Despite the tightening restrictions on communications tools, citizen journalists inside Iran have been hard at work. Video clips are widely available on the net, as are photos of Iranian voters and post-election protests. Although YouTube and DailyMotion are both blocked, we were able to upload a small video to Vimeo. The generally slow Internet speeds will hinder the upload of large files.

ONI has confirmed the expansion of blocking over the past several days, making access to ongoing reporting of events as well as political organizing far more difficult for Iranians. In the past several days, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook have been blocked. The English version of BBC is now blocked; the Persian version has been blocked for months. Websites of the major opposition candidates are all blocked, including Mousavi’s website  mirhussein.com) and Karoubi’s website  teribon.com). The blog host, blogfa.com, has been down for several days now, preventing many Iranian bloggers from updating their blogs.

We tested the thirty web sites that receive disproportionate attention from the reformist segments of the Iran blogosphere and about half of these are not blocked, including norooznews.ir, webneveshteha.com, emruz.biz, emruz.info, yaarinews.com, mowj.ir, maryamshab.blogfa.com, mirhussein.com, masoudbehnoud.com, drmoeen.ir and noandish.com. Among those not blocked include ghalamnews.ir, aftabnews.ir and khatami.ir. (Thanks to John Kelly for the list of sites that we tested. This is derived from the blogosphere mapping work of John Kelly and Bruce Etling).

In response, some pro-democracy activists are targeting government Web sites with DDOS attacks in an attempt to strike back at the current regime. While they have had some success – leader.ir, ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir were reported to be down – experts worry that the attacks may be used by the Iranian government to justify their own filtering or, worse, may cripple the Iranian network as a whole. (Note: Leader.ir was back up when we tested. Ahmadinejad.ir and iribnews.ir were still down.)

Many years of Internet filtering have prompted the development of circumvention tools by and for Iranians. Many Internet users in Iran have become adept at getting past the Internet censors there. An unintended consequence is that there are many sophisticated users and tools that are prepared to circumvent government attempts to limit access to online sites. This increase in filtering associated with the elections can be expected to increase the demand for access to and knowledge about circumvention technology.

These measures to further limit access to information around the contested election results are not going to help the current the Iranian government if it seeks to build legitimacy.

By John Kelly and Bruce Etling

Based on our monitoring of the Iranian blogosphere on election eve, it looks like Mousavi has broader support in the online blog community than Ahmadinejad. (For a broader understanding of the different attentive clusters in Iran check out our new online interactive Iran blogosphere map). The below maps show who is linking to websites associated with the candidates. It’s pretty interesting to see the contrast between Ahmadinejad  emtedadmehr.com), whose links are very concentrated in the Conservative Politics cluster, and Mousavi  mirhussein.com), whose links come from all over the map, not just the reformist politics group.

We are particularly struck by how many links come from the poetry cluster, which rarely links to political sites. Also, Moussavi has even more links from the CyberShi’a than Ahmadinejad.

This online interest doesn’t necessarily translate to the offline world, but it may indicate a broader level of excitement about Mousavi in the electorate, particularly among those outside his expected base of supporters, which could ultimately lead to higher voter turn out for Mousavi.

As Hamid Tehrani wrote earlier this week, YouTube is being used a lot by Iranians in this election. Here is one of the YouTube videos most linked to by reformists.

And here is the video most linked to by conservatives, which Hamid pointed to earlier in the week as an example of conservatives trying to discredit Khatami, who has supported Mousavi since he dropped out of the race himself.

Iran experts caution against trying to predict election winners Iran (because we’ve been surprised before), and we’d caution against predicting a Mousavi win just on this analysis, but it is certainly interesting to see the larger level of online support for Mousavi on the eve of the election. We’ll have to leave it to the voters at this point.

Some additional data and analysis on Iran’s election eve blogosphere is posted on Morningside Analytics Shifting the Debate blog. You can also catch an interview and find all of Hamid Tehrani’s posts on the Internet and the Iranian election on the PBS Web site.

Check back here next week for the big release of our Arabic blogosphere paper and accompanying event at USIP.