Internet & Democracy Blog

For readers and netizens living under an iron curtain of internet and political repression (fighting river crabs), anonymous blogging is an important free speech enabler. Like 18th century phampleteers (or even the writers of the Federalist papers), anonymous bloggers are empowered by their aliases to challenge taboos, censors and government power.

This updated guide (edited by Global Voices/Berkman guru Ethan Zuckerman) lays out the best practices of protecting your identity without silencing your voice, including the Tor anonymizer with Wordpress and email tricks. The internet is the last bulwark against totalitarian control because of its fluid and democratic character. That is why anonymous blogging is so important. Difficult to trace or gag, it is the kind of speech most likely to impact an increasingly interconnected and web-dependent world.

Of course, be extremely careful. Use these tools at your discretion. Reporters Without Borders has a comprehensive list of jailed cyber-dissidents. This past week, an Iranian blogger died in prison custody, while the Iranian parliament considered passing a chilling law, turning seditious and anti-clerical blogging into a capital offense. And this in a country with millions of internet users and thousands of blogs…

For a good primer and summary of Chinese internet censorship, including the hilarious alpaca incident, read this TIME magazine piece on the topic.

The justification for sweeping control of the internet has always superficially been to combat vice like child pornography or gambling. What is alarming, but unsurprising, is how often these public reasons are simply cover for political blacklisting. As an author for Wikileaks puts it:

[C]ases such as Thailand and Finland demonstrate that once a secret censorship system is established for pornographic content the same system can rapidly expand to cover other material, including political material, at the worst possible moment — when government needs reform.

I think most people, including most Chinese, understand that the Great Fire Wall is explicitly political as well, uniformly banning discussion of the Party’s opponents: Falun Gong, Charter 08 democracy agitators and foreign journalists.

What seems to me almost as pernicious is the new crop of open Westernized democracies now instituting nanny-filters as well as blacklists. This includes countries like Denmark and Australia, and to a lesser degree Thailand, where a presumption of free speech seems warranted. According to Wikileaks, the Danish blacklist is “generated without judicial or public oversight and is kept secret by the ISPs using it. Unaccountability is intrinsic to such a secret censorship system.”

Thankfully, Wikileaks and others have uncovered some of the blacklists, exposing free speech violations, like the banned anti-abortion site in Australia. The Australian bureaucrats’ solution?

Just ban Wikileaks. And the cycle continues.

This morning my blackberry buzzed with a link to this gem of an internet censorship story (Hat Tip: Byran Haut). I haven’t had a chance until now to pile on, and of course Andrew Sullivan has already beaten me to the punch.

Regardless, here’s the story. Since China moved to contain the pro-democratic Charter 08 movement by shutting down sympathetic online forums, China’s massive internet firewall has become even more draconian. The government’s public campaign has always about pornography, but this is often convenient cover to censor sites with uncomfortable political content. Bloggers, long burdened by the censorship regime, have even started referring to site takedowns as “harmonizations,” a joke on President Hu Jintao’s constant reference to the “harmonious society” of Confucian social theory.

Chinese netizens, in a move as frankly subversive as it is deeply funny, are striking back. A video released last January plays a seemingly innocuous children’s song about alpacas, or “river-mud-horses”, who fight against a band of “river crabs” (a near homonym to the word for “harmony”) seeking to invade their fields. As it turns out, these mythological creatures sound like something quite else in spoken Chinese. VideoGum has the translation the Times won’t give you:

The children are singing about grass mud horses (”Fuck Your Mother”) who live in a desert (”Your Mother’s C-word”) (ha), and defeat the river crabs (a word synonymous with “censorship.”) Do you know what this means? It means YouTube is IMPORTANT.

At first, it may tempting to see the video as childish, like “Ataturk is gay” and “Thai king monkey” videos which convulsed censors, Turkish and Thai respectively. On the other hand, as those episodes illustrate, where the law punishes open speech about sensitive material, farce may be the only remaining outlet. Make me think of the many vulgar Revolutionary War cartoons printed with gleeful impunity. Also remember that the Internet is much more heavily filtered in China than in either Thailand or Turkey.

As the Times’ writer eloquently puts it:

The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.

It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.

As I have said several times now on this blog, costly censorship regimes like the Chinese will never be successful in the long run. Too costly and too ineffective. The Internet, and indeed language itself, resist this kind of comprehensive control. Nor is this movement a fringe; the joke is rapidly spreading across China, no doubt bristling the country’s zealous censors.

An irony, of course, is that “river crab” was scrubbed from Wikipedia yesterday. Someone seems to think it is a “NON notable neologism.” Only when the “grass mud horses” are victorious, my friend. Only then.

Our friend Evgeny Morozov has a great new piece in Newsweek exploring how democratic governments and dictatorial regimes alike are successfully leveraging the Internet. He cites a number of examples we’ve brought to light on this blog, including Iranian Basiji bloggers and their location on our new Iranian blogosphere map, Israel-directed bloggers during the war in Gaza, and public diplomacy 2.0 in the US. He cites our own John Kelly on Iran’s efforts, writing, “John Kelly, an expert in the Iranian blogosphere at Harvard’s Berkman Center, has found that in the last year, the proportion of religious sites among the top 5,000 most-linked Iranian blogs has grown from 16 percent to 31 percent.”

The Kremlin of course is no stranger to the benefits of the Web either. While it is surprising to many that the Kremlin doesn’t block the Internet at all, Evgeny thinks this might be because they have had better luck spinning it. He writes:

The Kremlin uses a private firm, New Media Stars, founded by Konstantyn Rykov, a 29-year-old Duma deputy. Rykov’s new media empire includes online news sites, a site for supporters of Vladimir Putin (zaputina.ru—”For Putin!”), online games and an Internet TV channel with a pro-Kremlin bent. Navigating these mazes of propaganda and trying to plant effective pro-American messages would be difficult even for a Web-savvy State Department.

The article also sheds light on China’s ‘50 cent party,’ or the “loose networks of ordinary Netizens to promote government ideology by identifying and countering dissenting opinions on the Web.” A sort of Red Guard for the Internet.

This mobilization of ordinary citizens to push government propaganda may be the most successful tactic for governments on the Internet, instead of public relations campaigns like the Bush administration’s failed efforts to ‘rebrand’ the US in the Middle East, or the Kremin hiring of a web-savvy PR firm to promote its agenda. Further, as Evgeny pointed out during Russia’s war with Georgia last summer, the government may not need to push that hard to get Netizens to act on their behalf, especially when public opinion and traditional media are behind the government. My analysis of our data on the Russian blogosphere during that time showed that the majority of Russian language bloggers were also supportive of the government and highly critical of Georgia, especially President Saakashvili. However, examples like this may say more about the ‘rally around the flag’ effect, than anything inherent about Internet communication during war.

Interesting reports coming from the New York Times earlier last week that there are some indications that the Chinese government has been stepping up efforts to aggressively filter and censor content online. As they report:

Since early January, the government has been waging a decency campaign that has closed more than 1,500 Web sites found to contain sex, violence or “vulgarity.” Numerous other sites, including Google, have responded by removing any pages that might offend puritanical sensibilities.

But indecency is often in the eye of the beholder. Last month, Bullog, a popular bastion for freewheeling bloggers, was shut down for what the authorities said were its “large amounts of harmful information on current events,” according to a notice posted by the site’s founder, Luo Yonghao. When Mr. Luo briefly resuscitated the site on Sunday using an overseas server, it was blocked again.

Many people here believe that Bullog may have crossed a line by posting information about Charter 08, an online petition calling for democratic reforms. Organizers say the manifesto has garnered thousands of signatures since its introduction in December. Within the Chinese Internet firewall, it is now nearly impossible to find a copy.

It’ll be interesting to see how this back-and-forth game between China’s online public (which, at 300 million, is the largest in the world) and the government evolve, particularly as the worldwide economic downturn sparks increased dissent and anger against the ruling Communist party online.

Make sure you give some time to this great piece by Rebecca MacKinnon, a former Berkman fellow and currently an indispensable inside-source on China, freedom, internet censorship, etc. Her open letter to Pres. Obama on the value of the internet in re-defining U.S.-China relationships hits it exactly on the mark, especially in suggesting that a new post-”Radio Free Asia” kind of public diplomacy is necessary to engage the Web 2.0 generation of Chinese fervently using blogs, Skype and Twitter. (On the theme of revamping public diplomacy, see my piece about James Glassman.)

Here’s the clip of the awkward censoring of Obama’s inaugural by China’s state-run CCTV, which we also blogged about yesterday. The Times also has a piece on this today.

Hat Tip: Joshua Keating

According to the BBC, Chinese censors took their little red pens to sections of President Obama’s inaugural address that mentioned defeating communism and silencing dissent. While English language versions of the speech were not filtered on the Internet, Chinese translations struck the following key passages:

“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history,” which was cut in its entirety, while the following sentence had the work communism struck, “Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions.”

As we have discussed here before, China has one of the most pervasive Internet filtering regimes in the world, which, according to Rebecca MacKinnon, follows the government’s playbook for censorship of traditional media. Chinese leaders are also apprehensive about the new administration’s policy towards China, which may break with Bush’s generally friendly approach.

While media outlets around the world are cutting back international coverage and staff, China is actually looking to expand its global media empire. According to the New York Times, they are basing their expansion plans on the Al Jazeera model:

The country’s increasingly wealthy media giants, which operate under China’s censorship rules and according to its propaganda motives, are trying to acquire international media assets, to open more overseas news bureaus and to publish and broadcast more broadly in English and other languages. Many of them have already announced plans to hire English-speaking Chinese and foreign media specialists.

The plan, first reported Monday in The South China Morning Post, includes the creation of a 24-hour news channel modeled on Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language news network, with correspondents around the world.

The primary objectives, which are totally contradictory, are to improve China’s image overseas while at the same time creating a respected international news channel. I find it very hard to believe that a country that goes to such great lengths to filter the Web and control media outlets, will ever allow the creation of an independent news room. If the goal is image control, the future news channel will be another Alhurra fiasco, and never an Al Jazeera.

I thought this Huffington op-ed pretty uniquely turns the tables on the “evil American corporations are complying with foreign autocrats” meme. The argument is that censorship ends up being a trade barrier, by cramping IT products from functioning fully. Google in China is a tainted product. Instead of punishing U.S. companies who, for legal reasons, comply with the demands of censorship regimes, the whole issue could be recast as an unfair trade barrier, and therefore addressable by a body like the WTO.

This would effectively turn the levers of international finance against censorship, and may provide the kind of incentive needed for a county like China to consider opening up a bit. I’m not totally convinced it would work. The Chinese Communist Party seems, despite cost and bad PR , pretty hellbent on controlling information. Nonetheless, it’s refreshing to hear the unusual perspective of Big Business on the question.