I&D Blog

Joe Lieberman recently called for Google to pull down a number of YouTube videos that showed attacks by Al Qaeda on US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. YouTube reviewed the clips in question and removed 80 some videos for violation of their community guidelines because they “depicted gratuitous violence, advocated violence, or used hate speech,” but refused to pull down many of clips Lieberman criticized, and also refused to pull all content created by groups the US government designates as terrorist groups. In response to Lieberman, a YouTube blog post stated:

YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view. We believe that YouTube is a richer and more relevant platform for users precisely because it hosts a diverse range of views, and rather than stifle debate we allow our users to view all acceptable content and make up their own minds.

In another example from the New York Times we learn that a Belgian woman, Malika El Aroud, is using the Internet as her primary vehicle to support jihad. She was married to a former Al Qaeda operative who killed Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, on September 9, 2001. This assassination was almost surely carried out on the orders of Osama Bin Laden to get rid Masoud, who would have been the United States’ primary ally in the invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. It seems that Belgian law allows a great deal of free speech and that she stays within its bounds–she was kicked out of Switzerland for running similar jihadi sites.

One of the foundational questions in the study (and use) of the Internet is whether or not online speech, and the Internet in general, should be regulated. It also goes to the heart of questions of whether the Internet and its widely available interactive technologies, low barriers to entry and easy publication tools will be used to support democracy, or, in the dystopian view, will be used to support terrorism and to spread messages of hate.

These examples show that the Internet, like any communication medium, can and will be used by both democracy advocates and terrorists. The issue is whether use by some for terrorism should lead to broader regulation to limit free speech on the Internet in democracies. Those with ideologies we would find abhorrent will use the same tools as the rest of the community at large to communicate. We wouldn’t ban the use of cell phones because terrorists use them, or regulate the speech allowed on a cell phone, so why would we do it on the Internet? The question of regulation is also much tricker on the Internet–where the old hub and spoke mass media model and related regulation regimes do not fit. Regulation in regards to terrorism is further clouded by the general recalibration of civil liberties and speech in the US following 9/11. Worse, the speech that often leads to cases that lead to regulation or court decisions often comes from the truly offensive and those with politically indefensible positions–terrorists, pornographers, etc. The danger, and yet one more unanswered question, is where do you stop limiting speech once you start, and who gets to choose?

Digital Natives that were born after 1980 may not realize that the actual verse says the meek shall inherit the earth. David Brooks writes today about the rise of ‘alpha geeks’ to political and economic power thanks to the information revolution. He writes:

The future historians of the nerd ascendancy will likely note that the great empowerment phase began in the 1980s with the rise of Microsoft and the digital economy. Nerds began making large amounts of money and acquired economic credibility, the seedbed of social prestige. The information revolution produced a parade of highly confident nerd moguls — Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and so on.

Nothing really new here.

However, as we have written often, the spread of easy-to-use, interactive (Web 2.0) technologies, increased Internet penetration rates and the spread of cell phones to even the poorest countries may lead to changes in the political balance of power. As Yochai Benkler writes, technology eliminates gatekeepers in media, corporations and government that formerly dictated what content was politically and culturally relevant. These technologies put decision making about what is politically salient into the hands of the individuals instead of institutions, who can then produce culture and organize themselves for political goals without the need for formal institutions or hierarchies.

This does not mean that the value of leadership has diminished. Brooks notes the rise of Internet stars like Larry Lessig and others who can lead otherwise disparate groups of geeks towards common goals. And The Atlantic also argues that this US election may result in major structural changes in how government uses technology to put more information into the hands of citizens about how government works.

Since governments are rarely hotbeds of innovation, especially in their use of technology, the best thing they can do is to automatically release more information about how the government spends its money, makes policy decisions and writes laws–including who influences those decisions. Now, the onus is on citizens to first request that information. Because of the distributed collaboration allowed by the Internet, this information (once released) can then be used by groups like the Sunlight Foundation, MapLight, Change Congress and others to sift through those records with the help of citizens and make it politically useful to the population.

If the narrative of the 1980 and 90s was the rise of Alpha geeks, the narrative of the Web 2.0 generation’s impact on politics may be Justice Brandeis’s phrase from the nearly 100 years ago–“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

The newly launched Publius Project at Berkman has a number of excellent essays on ‘constitutional moments’ on the Internet (the project is drawing its inspiration and name from Hamilton, Madison and Jay’s Federalist Papers, which were written under the moniker Publius). Clay Shirky’s essay, and I know a number of future pieces, deserves reading by those interested in the Internet and its impact on democracy. Shirky hits on a number of themes that have also been discussed on this blog, including the use of Facebook by activist overseas to organize protests.

Shirky tells the story of 40,000 students that organized themselves on MySpace and walked out of schools to protest HR4437–a bill that would have made illegal immigration a felony instead of a misdemeanor. Shirky writes:

There were several remarkable things about the protest. The size of the walkout alone made it unusual — getting tens of thousands people to take any coordinated political action is hard. Getting high school students to do so, when most of them are too young to vote, is even harder. Being able to do so without the school administration knowing was hardest of all — keeping a secret among 40,000 people has never been trivial. And doing it all in 48 hours should have been impossible — would have been impossible, in fact, even a year before.

The thing that made an instant, secret, and huge protest possible was the spread of new communication tools, especially MySpace and text messages on the phone. Armed with these tools, students were able to coordinate with one another, not just person to person but in groups. Using these tools, the messages they exchanged went to the people who mattered — the other students — without reaching the school administrators.

Shirky points out that the tool did not lead to the protests (political motivation did), but tools did make it easier to organize incredibly quickly and without the knowledge of the “authorities.” Shirky details a number of other cases in his book where citizens organize online for both substantive and inane objectives–from passing a passengers’ bill of rights to protesting the cancellation of a TV show. He shared a number of thoughts about the book with a group here at Berkman not long ago that you can view here.

We look forward to future essays from the Publius project on the Internet and democracy–as well as future work by Clay Shirky.

According to a story by AFP, the Iranian government has redoubled efforts to block websites that support women’s rights. In our paper on the Iranian blogosphere, we drew on research from the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) that found blogs are far less blocked than we would have expected. ONI researchers did indeed find that blogs by women’s groups were blocked, suggesting that this type of content is becoming increasingly sensitive. Women’s Rights activists such as Parvin Ardalan have also been jailed and harassed by the regime recently. According to Reporter’s Without Borders, Iran does indeed have one of the most restrictive media environments in the world. ONI’s recent book on global filtering also shows that Iran has one of the more technically sophisticated filtering regimes in the world. However, others have argued that under “Repression 2.0″ governments like China and Iran have an interest in making others believe that filtering, censorship and surveillance are far more pervasive than they actually are, in hopes of increasing self-censorship. We look forward to more research from ONI on what filtering is taking place in Iran and how it is conducted, especially as it pertains to women’s rights groups.

The following short film was made by members of the Internet & Democracy Project. It features interviews with the world’s top digital activists, talking about how cell phones and the Internet are empowering the individual in her fight for social and political change.

Click To Play

Moving Beyond Anecdote

When discussing the effect on the Internet on democracy we seem to be trapped in anecdote. We’ve seen examples of how low-cost digital tools like Facebook, Youtube, and blogs have been used to unite people globally around a cause, increase awareness of civil rights abuse, and share information about social justice campaigns.

But how do we move beyond the anecdotal examples of the Facebook group which organized to support the monks in Burma, the video of Zimbabwean union members being beaten by police, and the blog-based campaign to release the blogger Abdel-Monem Mahmoud? What does all this activity mean about the effects of the Internet on democracy?

The Internet and Political Power

One way to go about answering this question is to go back to first principles, to look at the network structure of the Internet and see what about it might constitute a democratizing force. In using the term “democratizing force,” I am not referring to institutional change, to a government becoming more responsive to citizens. I am referring to a more literal definition of democracy: “the people rule” (demos kratia). “Democratizing forces” increase the power of citizens. So when I say that the Internet might constitute a “democratizing force,” (and I belive it does), I mean that the Internet increases the political power of the people that use it.

How does the Internet increase the political power of its users? The effect is not primarily institutional. The institutions of democratic government by and large have not moved onto the Internet. Online e-voting is still uncommon and binding hearings and caucuses rarely occur in cyber-space. This makes the task of showing that the Internet increases political power more difficult, because the lack of institutional presence on the Internet implies that the Internet increases power informally rather than institutionally.

Democratic institutions exist to decentralize power from the executive. The judicial branch, legislative branch, universal suffrage, and the like all serve this purpose. However, decentralization of power is a central tenet of democracy even outside the institutional context. When institutions are removed, democracy is still all about the idea that the authority to make decision that effect the public are not decided only by a head of state or small group of elites but, to the greatest extent possible, by the people affected by that decision.
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There has been a great deal of speculation lately, including in the British Telegraph and Boston Globe, that the military junta’s horrific response to the humanitarian crisis in Burma may lead to their downfall. As the New York Times reported, the junta went forward with a constitutional referendum to further entrench their rule everywhere in the country except in cyclone effected areas (and even there, the vote was only delayed until May 24th). Amazingly, those seeking shelter in schools or other public buildings because their homes were destroyed were kicked out by the government to make way for polling stations.

As highlighted in the OpenNet Initiative’s technical analysis of the shut down of the Internet after last year’s political demonstrations, the junta clearly wants tight control over all information that comes in and goes out the country. Their reaction to offers of humanitarian assistance from abroad is not surprising–they want to control all of it, just like everything else in the country. Most offers of assistance were initially turned down, the government has been slow to process visas for aid workers, aid that has made it through has been taken by the regime for its own use, and those that tried to distribute aid on their own have been stopped. There are now government road blocks to prevent foreign aid workers from reaching cyclone survivors.

But how realistic is it that the regime could lose power? In any political revolution, there is a flash point that raises already simmering discontent over to a boil. This often includes economic factors such as relative deprivation, food crises, and other factors that lead to demands for political change. There is something that must get the masses into the streets, and emboldened enough to stand up to the existing regime. The most recent Burmese protests were driven by plans to end government fuel subsidies, and photos and information were shared virally through the Web to increase knowledge globally about the protests and no doubt to generate international support, and possibly a level of protection for protesters.

Obviously, the situation was dire in Burma even before the cyclone. The regime appears to be bungling the relief effort and has further tarnished their already poor reputation. With such tight control of information within the country, one has to wonder if the stories of denied humanitarian aid, interference in aid distribution by the government and other examples of a severely mismanaged response are circulating within Burma as much as they are on the Internet and global press. These lead to international pressure, but the regime has been able to ignore those calls for change from outside for years. Sadly, it seems that without greater access to information internally about the regimes response to the crisis, that the average Burmese citizen will likely not be able to do much but continue to focus on survival in the short term.

The logic in a New York Times article that discusses concerns by Kuwaitis before Parliamentary elections that they are falling behind their neighbors economically because of their (limited, but growing) democratic institutions seems a bit off. Blaming a democratic political system for economic problems (slow growth , high unemployment, etc.) is unfortunately quite common in new or transitioning democracies. Before any election in any part of the world, the economy is often a leading, if not the top issue on voters minds. The article raises interesting and still unsettled questions about causation versus correlation between healthy democracies and strong market economies. The two go together, but are not necessarily caused by one another. Seymour Martin Lipset was one of the first to argue that wealth was a precondition for democracy. Samuel Huntington observed that poverty was probably the principal obstacle to increased democratization. But, there is a mutually reinforcing effect of a strong middle class on democracy. Look at the world richest countries and you will also find the strongest democracies–except in the oil-rich Gulf states like Kuwait. Huntington and others have argued that this democratic deficit in the Middle East is because autocrats there have been able to give citizens state-financed public goods–schools, healthcare, etc., all with low or no taxes–in return for limited political freedom. In Kuwait,the question really should be why when oil is hovering around $120/barrel, how in the world is it managing it’s economy so poorly. That sounds like poor governance and inept management of the economy, not too much democracy. Kuwaitis are among the few in the region who actually have the ability to vote out those they think are managing the economy poorly and replace them with those they believe can do a better job. If it was more of a dictatorship, the opportunity to debate the issue at all would not even be possible. It is easy to understand frustration with poor economic performance, but a bit of a stretch to blame it on democracy.

Stacy Perlman, a senior at Northeastern University, interviewed me a few weeks back for a piece on the use of Google Maps for human rights activism. The result, “Mapping Genocide: Google Earth and Darfur,” is a wonderful narrative piece of journalism, plotting the emergence of Crisis in Darfur through Ushahidi. Stacy captures the crucial crux of this issue:

 While there is no way to monitor how many people have been influenced by the map to join an advocacy group, lobby congress or donate money, a case study report on the project noted that “more than 100,000 have visited the “What Can I Do?” page on the museum’s site to find out how they can help.” The page provides a variety of ways to take a stand including contacting the media to tell them there is a lack of coverage on the issue and communicating with decision-makers such as the U.S. government and the United Nations about the need for humanitarian assistance.

While crediting the Crisis in Darfur Map as a great awareness tool, Joshua Goldstein, a graduate research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School noted that the obvious pushback to a project like this is that “at the end of the day you’re not saving lives.” Although awareness about Darfur is critical, Goldstein makes the point that awareness that leads to activism is even more crucial.

Some interesting results on global attitudes towards press and Internet freedom from a poll by World Public Opinion in honor of Press Freedom Day–including who leads the pack. The good news is that majorities around the world support press freedom. However, two countries we have been following lately, Iran, as part of our study of the Iranian blogosphere, and Russia, have relatively low levels of support compared to others. The survey says the following about Iranian public opinion towards Internet and media freedom:

“While two thirds of Iranians favor press freedom, overall their support is among the weakest. Iranians are one of two publics asked that lean in favor of the government having the right to restrict access to information on the Internet and among the few nations that feel the government should have the right to prevent the press from publishing news and ideas that could be destabilizing. However, a large majority believes Iranians should have the right to read publications from all other countries.

–A majority of Iranians (65%) agrees that it is important for the press to have the freedom to publish news and ideas without government control.

–44% support the government having the right to prevent people from having access to some things on the Internet, while 32% believe people should have the right to read whatever is on the Internet.

–A plurality (45%) favors the argument that the government should have the right to restrict the press’ freedom to publish things it thinks could be destabilizing, while 31% prefer the argument that the press should have the right to publish news and ideas without government control.

–A very large majority (79%) believes people in Iran should have the right to read publications from all other countries.

–Iranians most commonly say that the press has “some” freedom in their country (45%), while just very few (17%) say that it has “a lot” of freedom. Most say that the press should have the same amount of freedom as it does now (43%), while fewer say it should have more (34%) or less freedom (9%).”

And for Russia, equally low support in regard to government regulation of speech if helps ensure stability. According to the survey results:

“Although a substantial majority of Russians agree it is important for the media to be free to publish news and ideas without government control, it is the second smallest majority. More significantly, Russians are one of the few publics (and the only non-Muslim one) divided on whether the government should have the right to control the media in the effort to preserve stability. They are among the publics with the lowest levels of support for the media gaining more freedom than it already has.

–64% of Russians feel it is either somewhat (41%) or very important (23%) for the media to be free to publish news and ideas without government control, while 57% believe they should have the right to read whatever is on the Internet.

–Given two positions, Russians are one of the few publics divided on whether the media should have the right to publish news and ideas without government control (45%) or whether the government should have the right to prevent the media from publishing things in order to preserve stability (44%).

–71% in Russia believe that they should have the right to read publications from all other countries, even those considered enemies.

–Asked how much freedom the media currently have in Russia, the most common view is it has “some” (44%), followed by “a lot” (25%). Only 39% believe the media should have more freedom, while 33% believe it should have the same amount and 17% believe it should have less.”

And which country has the highest level of support for Press Freedom? US? UK? Sweden? Nope.

It’s Mexico.

As the poll says, “Mexicans have the largest majorities saying freedom of the media is “very important” and that the media in their country should have greater freedom. Mexico has one of the largest majorities in support of media being free to publish news and ideas as opposed to allowing the government to impose restrictions to maintain stability.”

It would be interesting to learn why Mexican support for press freedom is so high.