Internet & Democracy Blog

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!

Vittorio Zambardino writes today in La Repubblica about a recent research study carried out on the Italian blogosphere: what are Italian bloggers writing about? The article presents very interesting graphs, which show the top tags used in 2009 and the topics Italian bloggers write about.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the top tag in 2009 was Silvio Berlusconi, which is followed by two current affairs related tags: the economic crisis and the Abruzzo earthquake - which are followed by Facebook in fourth place. In the top 15 most used tags we also find two football teams, Inter Milan and AC Milan, president Obama and the Pope.

Amongst the most discussed topics we find: 1) current affairs 2) soccer 3) the Internet 4) sport 5) politics. These are followed by a rather detailed list of less discussed topics from cinema, to art, to cooking, to music and so on. Finding current affairs at first place and politics at 5th place was indeed rather reassuring, supporting the idea that the Internet is indeed used as a virtual agora for discussion or a virtual civil society, rather than merely a tool for entertainment purposes. It should be noticed, however, that Maria de Filippi (TV presenter of Mediaset reality TV shows) was the top tag in the ‘entertainment category’, where we can find blogger Beppe Grillo at 4th place, and journalists Marco Travaglio and Michele Santoro further down in the list. Finally, finding the Internet as third most discussed topic, was also unsurprising - this is a common finding from research of different country/language blogospheres, where a big proportion of bloggers is made up by IT/media enthusiasts who blog about the medium they are using for communication (see for example our research on different language blogospheres from the Berkman’s Internet and Democracy project).

While the methodology used for this study is not illustrated in this article, it certainly provides a really good snapshot of what the online community and bloggers are talking about: this is very informative of what is going on in Italian society - and should be compared to the news agenda of mainstream media, in order to establish the role of the Internet in public discourse.

[Cross-posted on Corinna di Gennaro's blog]

Reporters without Borders reports that Iranian-American journalist, Roxana Saberi — sentenced last Saturday to 8 years in prison after a sham 1 day closed trial in Tehran — is protesting her detention with a hunger strike. (For more background on Saberi, and her dubious arrest by Iranian authorities, read this profile by her former employer, the BBC.)

Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not typically the most civil liberties friendly, had directly appealed to the Iran’s independent judiciary to process the case of Saberi with openness and transparency. Perhaps he is feeling the pressure of a potential American rapprochement. The visibility of the Saberi case could easily flare up into a full grown diplomatic feud. So far, Secretary Clinton’s language has been measured, though concerned.

Might the internet play a constructive role here in changing the diplomatic end game by raising the heat on Iranian authorities? Imagine, it was years before Solzhenitsin could get The Gulag Archipelago published in the West, much less in the Soviet Union. Now, despite all the Iranians’ best efforts at a low key and hack job political trial, anyone with Google can learn the inner workings of Saberi’s detention and moreover Iran’s infamous Evin political prison where she’s being held.

While — as AbuAardvark and NetEffect’s Evgeny Morozov have been right to point out — the internet is not radically democraticizing the world, it does raise the embarassment and diplomatic costs of political prisoners. Hard to complain you’ve been shut out of the community of nations when your injustice is plainly on display. And the web is what solves this informational assymetry, even if it can’t shake kings and autocrats.

Saberi’s partner, Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi, has written an open letter appealing to Iranian authorities. The letter can be read in full here and is circulating on numerous media outlets and websites (BBC, Campaign for Human Rights in Iran to name a few).

Tweet it, RT it, blog, and howl. Roxana should be free.

Marc Lynch, aka Abu Aardvark, has posed a depressing, if necessary question. If internet activism rarely topples an authoritarian regime (see, for example, the failure of Burma’s Saffron Revolution or Egypt’s April 6 Facebook strike, which I perhaps too cheerily praised back in Jan.), isn’t it morally problematic for Westerners to egg on activists they know will not succeed? For all our efforts to praise individual movement leaders, all we end up doing is putting those folks more squarely in the crosshairs of the secret police.

This is all in line with the appropriate caution that Evgeny Morozov outlined in his recent Boston Review piece (see also my thoughts on that piece here). Power is power, and in most of these countries, it continues to flow straight from the barrel of a gun, not any robust notion of democratic legitimacy. X Arab autocracy or Y East Asian dictatorship is likely to feel threatened from within by an independent blogging class and humiliated from without by the ridicule of Westernized democracies. When the Burmese junta could no longer take the heat, they simply downed the internet completely, convenient to do when all ISP’s are centrally licensed and controlled anyway.

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Back in January, I reported on an innovative new contest called Apps For America being sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation. The contest was to build easy-to-use apps with raw government API data dumps. The sprawling federal government seems (and often is) frustratingly inaccessible. Bypassing expensive IT consultants, this contest sought to increase citizen participation with iPhone-like simplicity.

The winners were announced yesterday, with hip Filibusted taking first place. It’s a brilliant little program that tracks filibuster and cloture votes, and sends updates to users via tweet. This could help your average Joe follow the arcane procedural dance also known as the U.S. Senate in an open, comprehensible way.

I encourage you to check out the other winners here, and also to use them. Transparent government depends upon an active citizenry. When the bureaucracy shields itself with paper, the web can lower the transaction cost of democratizing access.

With over 700 million voters, India is the world’s largest democracy. Naturally, electoral fraud is a frequent problem. But social media may be changing that bleak picture. Guarav Mishra, a current Yahoo! Fellow and co-founder of Vote Report India, has been working to ensure fair (or fairer) elections, not by relying on international observers, but by appealing to the strength of India’s “digital” civil society.

How does civil society go “digital”? By adapting social networking technology and blogs to important civic aims like transparency, clean electoral practices and democratic legitimacy. Web-savvy young Indians — jolted into democratic participation some say by the horrific Mumbai terrorists attacks (see my coverage here) — are versatile with web 2.0 media, Twitter and, of course, SMS. Mishra’s Vote Report India, for example, builds a dynamic map (a la Al-Jazeera’s Gaza coverage) based on user-submitted reports of electoral abuse. Users can upload this data in a variety of ways:

By sending a message starting with VoteReport to 5676785
By sending an email to  report at votereport.in
By sending a tweet with the hashtag #votereport
By filling a form at the website

Despite India’s bewildering diversity of languages, customs and religions, technology is building a bridge to more robust civil society. I am heartened by the cacophanous and lively blogospheric debates about the elections, which now compete with the Indian MSM and party propaganda machines for attention (see Guarav’s round-up here).

The toleration of dissent and the encouragement of debate is key to democratic functioning, and so it’s also remarkable that these discussions include the voice of India’s Muslim minority and in broader contexts the vigorous debate over Varun Ghandi’s comments. Things aren’t perfect (see this recent Atlantic piece about the BJP in Gujarat), but blogs, SMS and Twitter are strengthening India’s democratic pulse.

Ethan Zuckerman has run some quanty numbers on the Moldovan #pman protests. Initially convinced that the broad publicity the event garnered had “as much to do with self-congratulatory Twitterers talking about the revolutionary potential of social media as… actual discussions concerning people in Moldova and the Moldovan diaspora,” the numbers suggest the opposite. Many users were Romanian speakers, propagating news of the flash protest and significantly increasing the visibility and viability of the protest movement.

To a degree, this is an encouraging sign of technology’s influence on political outcomes, especially in a country as poor as Moldova (though see my post about Twitter and rioting here). It’s initial effect is undeniable, but a larger question must be raised. How sustainable really is the movement? When will the “twittesters” or their followers lose interest?

The immediate goals of reversing electoral fraud seem within reach — after the bruising publicity #pman tags brought down Moldovan communists — but could any broad agenda of reform really succeed via crowd-sourced agitation? That I would be interested to see.

For more on the developing Moldovan Revolution, see the BBC’s report, NetEffect’s first story, then Daniel Bennet, and back to Morozov.

NetEffect has some preliminary thoughts on the role of Twitter in the on-going Moldovan youth protests. I think Morozov’s right to see them as a tech protest movement a la the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine (for full background, read Berkman’s study here). Both of these social movements were stoked, organized and facilitated by technology.

Twitter has not only helped rally protesters, though, it has also given us — as during the Mumbai bombings or the war in Gaza — a glimpse of reality on the ground. Visceral, real micro-news before the MSM or anyone else can write up a narrative of what’s happening. If you want to follow the action, start reading this tweet aggregator or search for tweets with the hashtag #pman.

One more point should be raised. Cell phones, Facebook and Twitter are morally neutral. Although they can be positive tools of peaceful protest and democratic engagement, they can’t prevent flashmobs become real mobs which break windows and destroy property, or worse. G-20 activists in London used Twitter to elude police and stage more coordinated (and sometimes violent) anti-globalization protests.

I don’t know if the Black Bloc anarchists who set the Strasbourg hotel on fire used Twitter to organize, but I wouldn’t be in the least surprised. It’s important not to forget this darker side of mass coordination. At least in a traditional social opposition movement, the supposed leader can call off violence. By contrast, a de-centralized twitter mob may not have enough allegiance or restraint to prevent destructive mayhem from breaking out.

John Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe, Senate backers of a bill which gives the executive branch broad crisis powers over the internet, have separately introduced legislation to create a “cyber-security czar.” This new federal position will oversee the many new programs, regulations and crisis planning which the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 lays out in fuller detail. The “czar” will require Senate confirmation, but will come with a high security clearance.

It’s not yet clear to me whether the president must give authority to shut down private networks for “national security” reasons, or whether, like the Federal Reserve, Obama’s technology “czar” will have broad discretionary power to determine and enact crisis measures. A figure like this may be necessary in an increasingly interconnected web filled with patriotic hackers (ask the Estonians about Russian DDOS attacks), astro-turfers and other digital mercenaries.

Still, while the vagueness of “national security” may match the amorphousness of cyber-threats, this is certainly a momentous power shift toward “federalizing” the web. I wonder how far down the road some kind of law enforcement censorship regime is. Australia and other Western democracies are facing that battle right now, and web freedom advocates are losing in spades.

New Senate legislation introduced by John Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) would grant the president sweeping powers to control the internet in the event of a cyber-security crisis, including control of the on/off switch for both public and private U.S. networks. The bill is said to follow many of the suggestions of a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report released Dec. 8, 2008, calling for a cyber-security czar. See my coverage of that report here.

Then, as now, my concern was how to balance self-defense from hackers and digital cossacks and civil liberties from bureaucrats and federal agencies. Crisis powers and preparations are one thing, unrestrained federal control of the web is quite another. Who will be able to declare an internet emergency… the executive branch? Could this end up being a backdoor for new surveillance efforts in the war on (digital?) “terrorists”?

The Center for Democracy and Technology managed to get a draft PDF of the legislation, which you can check out here. More coverage of this bill, which is already scaring the pants off computer professionals and civil libertarians, can be found here and here.