Internet & Democracy Blog

Hamid Tehrani and CNN report that Facebook is up again in Iran. Berkman’s new Herdict Reporter tells us that over the last few days Facebook was indeed inaccessible to some users in Iran, but, reflecting the distributed filtering model that Iran seems to employ, it was still accessible by some users depending on their ISP. These days I always go straight to Herdict to see what actual users in country are saying about filtering in real time instead of relying solely on press reports, and I’m deeply appreciative of the users in Iran that give us reports of what is blocked. For more on filtering in Iran check out Hamid’s excellent overview at Global Voices. As we’ve cataloged on this blog over the last couple months, it seems that filtering of Internet content by political threats like former president Khatami has been part of an overt strategy by the government.

A number of blogs and traditional media outlets, including those in Iran, reported that Facebook was blocked by Ahmadinejad in an attempt to thwart his more net savvy opponent Mousavi’s online campaign–although Ahmadinejad now denies it. Hamid has been doing a wonderful series on the use of social media by the Presidential candidates including reformists like Mousavi as well as Ahmadinejad and the least effective online campaigner, former Revolution Guard leader Mohsen Rezai. Unfortunately, the campaign has become far less interesting since former President Khatami dropped out in favor of Mousavi, but many speculate he was pressured to drop out since he was a larger threat to Ahmadinejad than Mousavi.

In the end, the Facebook debacle is another black eye on the election process in Iran, which has elements of a democratic election but falls far short of minimal ‘free and fair’ standards due to, first and foremost, the ability of small body of clerics, the Guardian Council, to approve or reject candidates, to say nothing of the limits on free speech and political organization in Iran. Let’s hope that the apparent easing of tensions between the US and Iran leads to an opening in the political process in the country. A smart first move might be for the Obama administration to ease restrictions on US social media providers who have users in Iran.

A recent Economist article takes you cyber-evangelists out there to task, arguing that young people’s use of social media to get Obama elected was nice, but it masks the real use of social media by youth, which they label ‘cyber-hedonism.’ The Economist asks:

…as young surfers are exposed to facts, sights, sounds and a range of interlocutors that are far beyond their parents’ ken, how will they use that access? Will they try to change the world, or simply settle for enjoying themselves?

Their answer: enjoying themselves.

Hence the minting of another ‘cyber’ hyphenated word to explain that (gasp!) teenagers use the Internet to flirt, meet people and look at pornography. It seems to me the pendulum that was initially too far on the side of cyber-optimists has now swung too far in the other direction. Like anything, the reality of how youth use the Internet is somewhere in the middle of extreme media viewpoints like this one. We have far too many examples of young people using the Internet for positive social change to say that it’s all hedonism. However, the Economist may be on to something when it writes:

In authoritarian countries with rising living standards—such as Russia and China, until recently—official tolerance of cyber-hedonism has been a sort of Faustian pact offered by the authorities: we will let you enjoy yourselves, in new and unconventional ways, if you keep off politics. But now that economies have turned sour, will the young go on keeping their side of that bargain?

Doubtful, if recent protests in Russia are any indication.

Today we had the pleasure of hosting Bahrain digital activist Esra’a Al Shafei, Founder and Executive Director of mideastyouth.com, for a chat about the amazing work of her community to promote “fierce but respectful debate among the diverse youth of the Middle East.” Esra’a started the Web site to increase understanding between Iranians and Arabs, and to move the online debate from one that was primarily a monologue to more of a discussion. She has worked on a number of minority rights and other online campaigns, including for Kurds (she refuses to stop identifying Kurds as from anywhere but ‘Kurdistan’) as well as the Baha’i in Iran. She also was a leader of the well-known Free Karim campaign, which she says she started during a lecture in college, among many other successful online efforts.

Esra’a emphasized that she sees blogging as nice, but is much more convinced by the power of YouTube videos, mashups, cartoons and other visual content to lead to change. Some of the group’s cartoons have been picked up in a number of newspapers in the region, and below is a mashup they made with clips from the movie (and popular graphic novel) Persepolis.

But this one is my favorite, a video of Iranian leaders dubbed over with speeches from Martin Luther King, Jack Kennedy, and Ghandi.

You can catch the full podcast of the talk here, and be sure to check out Mideastyouth.com, which is available in English, Arabic and Persian, and includes contributers from across the Middle East, as well as the US and Canada.

Check out this provocative and fascinating piece by Evgeny Morozov of the Open Society Institute. The central question it raises, whether the Internet is really a force for democratic change, is as complex as it is necessary to ask. Cyber-savvy young voters (see also our coverage of “Born Digital”), kindled by Obama, may have heralded a civic reawakening for America, but as Morozov rightly points out, one should be cautious about overstating the internet’s power as a catalyst for an activist citizenry, especially in authoritarian countries. As Morozov sadly notes:

The Berlin Wall may have fallen, but the Chinese Firewall has been erected in its place.

The role of the internet in democratization is sometimes ambivalent or contradictory. The Berkman study of the Saffron Revolution in Burma turned on this question. Why was the internet, so crucial in organizing and publicizing protests, not ultimately effective in overthrowing Burma’s repressive military junta?

Morozov provocatively points to the web’s endless stream of entertainment as a possible explanation for the malaise of democratic movements. The internet is a sirensong of cheap thrills and escapism, foreign movies and sex. It is slowly transforming “digital renegades” and potential activists into “digital captives” of Hollywood distraction. As Antony Loewenstein, author of a book about blogging in repressive regimes, remarked at a recent Berkman luncheon, far more bloggers want to meet girls than agitate for reform.

Having said all that, Morozov’s conclusion — that young people in repressive regimes prefer Paris Hilton clips to freedom — strikes me as too cynical. Though no quick fix panacea, the internet has contributed to greater participation and group association. Strong correlations between increased internet capability and democratization, though not ultimately conclusive, surely reinforce this belief.

Perhaps the changes have less to do with formal democratic movements than the immense proliferation of speech on the web. This is what makes the Iranian blogosphere so vibrant, the Chinese one so resilient and the Burmese one so dedicated, despite varying levels of autocratic control. The web has broken the authoritarian choke-hold over information, even if what is flooding in from the outside is imperfect or censored. Web 2.0 technology is clearly one source of this altered dynamic; it’s easier to gag a newspaper than censor a thousand blogs.

The more impossible internet output becomes to contain, the more plausible I think it is that censorship regimes will crack, even ones as massive as the Chinese firewall. This may not be democratic activism of the most visible form, but perhaps it gives more radical democratizing movements a chance to succeed.

Craig Newmark was visiting the Berkman Center today and he explained how founding Craiglist brought him to his current role as community organizer. But these are really the same, he says.

In 1994, Craig was working at Charles Schwab where he evangelized the net – figuring that this is the future of business for these types of firms. He showed people usenet newsgroups and The Well and he noticed people helping each other in very generous ways. He wanted to give back so he started a cc list for events in early 1995. He credits part of his success to the timing of this launch – early dot com boom. People were alwyas influential and for example suggested new categories etc. He was using pine for this and in mid 1995 he had 240 email addresses and pine started to break. He was going to call it SFevents, but people around him suggested CraigsList because it was a brand, and the list was more than events.

So he wrote some code to turn these emails into html and became a web publisher. At the end of 1997 3 events happened: CraigsList had one million page views per month (a billion in August 2004, now heading toward 13 billion per month), Microsoft Sidewalk approached him to run banner ads and he said no because he didn’t need the money, and then he was approached with the idea of having some of the site run on a volunteer basis. He went for volunteer help but in 1998 it didn’t work well since he wasn’t providing strong leadership for them. At the end of 1998 people approached him to fix this and so in 1999 he incorporated and hired Jim Buckmaster who continued the traditions of incorporating volunteer suggestions for the site, and maintained the simple design. Also in 1999 he decided to charge for job ads and to charge real estate agents (only apt brokers in NYC, which they requested to eliminate the perceived need to post and repost).

He has generalized his approach to “nerd values:” take care of yourself enough to live comfortably then after that you can start to focus on changing things.
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Marking a milestone in the battle for free expression and privacy online, The Berkman Center is announcing today the launch of the Global Network Initiative, a broad alliance of groups that are officially endorsing, promoting, and implementing a set of principles to protect the rights of users worldwide. From the site:

All over the world – from the Americas to Europe to the Middle East to Africa and Asia – companies in the Information & Communications Technology (ICT) sector face increasing government pressure to comply with domestic laws and policies in ways that may conflict with the internationally recognized human rights of freedom of expression and privacy.

In response, a multi-stakeholder group of companies, civil society organizations (including human rights and press freedom groups), investors and academics spent two years negotiating and creating a collaborative approach to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector, and have formed an Initiative to take this work forward.

You can read more about the work of the Global Network Initiative on the Berkman site and the statement of principles that they’re working from here.

This commitment in the GNI is a big step. The principles call on groups to affirmatively protect users rights to free expression and privacy even when confronted by government pressure. Moreover, the stakeholders include a broad array of major players in the information infrastructure, including Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Only time will tell how this declaration plays out in practice as governments increasingly attempt to shape the online space, but for now, it looks like a line has been drawn in the sand.

Yochai Benkler gave a talk today in reception of his appointment as the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. Jack Berkman (now deceased) is the father of Myles Berkman, whose family endowed both the Berkman Center (where I am a fellow) and Benkler’s professorial chair.

His talk was titled “After Selfishness: Wikipedia 1, Hobbes 0 at Half Time” and he sets out to show that there is a sea change happening in the study of organizational systems that far better reflects how we actually interact, organize, and operate. He explains that the collaborative movements we generally characterize as belonging to the new internet age (free and open source software, wikipedia) are really just the instantiation of a wider and pervasive, in fact completely natural and longstanding, phenomena in human life.

This is due to how we can organize capital in the information and networked society: We own the core physical means of production as well as knowledge, insight, and creativity. Now we’re seeing longstanding society practices, such as non-hierarchical norm generation and collaboration more from the periphery of society to the center of our productive enterprises. Benkler’s key point in this talk is that this shift is not limited to Internet-based environments, but part of a broader change happening across society.

So how to we get people to produce good stuff? money? prizes? competition? Benkler notes the example of YouTube.com – contributors are not paid yet the community thrives. Benkler hypothesizes that the key is that people feel secure in their involvement with the community: not paying but creating a context where people feel secure in their collaboration in a system. Another example is Kaltura.com: Benkler attributes their success to ways they have found to assure contributors that when you produce you will be able to control what you produce. Cash doesn’t change hands. The challenge is to learn about human collaboration in general from these web-based examples. In Benkler’s words “replacing Leviathan with a collaborative system.”

Examples outside the web-based world include GM’s experience with it’s Fremont plant. This plant was among the worst performance in the company. GM shut it down for two years and brought it back 85% staffed by the previous workforce, the same union, but reorganized collaboratively to align incentives. This means there are no longer process engineers on the shop floor and direct control over experimentation and flow at the team level is gone. The plant did so well it forced the big three to copy although they did so in less purely collaborative ways, such as retaining competitive bidding. Benkler’s point is that there is a need for long term relationships based on trust. An emphasis on norms and trust, along with greater teamwork and autonomy for workers implies a more complex system with less perfect control than Hobbes’ Leviathan vision. The world changes too quickly for the old encumbered hierarchical model of economic production.

Benkler thinks this leads us to study social dynamics, an open field without many answers yet. He also relates this work to evolutionary biology: from group selection theory of the 50’s to the individualistic conception in Dawkins’ theory of the selfish gene in the 70’s, and now to multi-level selection and cooperation as a distinct driving force in evolution as opposed to the other way around. This opens a vein of research in empirical deviations from selfishness, as a pillar of homo economicus, just as Kahneman and Tversky challenged the twin pillar of rationality.

Benkler’s vision is to move away from the simple rigid hierarchical models toward ones that are richer and more complex and can capture more of our actual behavior, while still being tractable enough to produce predictions and a larger understanding of our world.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

In the A2K3 panel on Open Access to Science and Research, Eve Gray, from the Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town, sees the Open Access movement as a real societal change. Accordingly she shows us a picture of Nelson Mandela and asks us to think about his release from prison and the amount of change that ushered in. She also asks us to consider whether or not Mandela is an international person or a local person. She sees a parallel with how South African society changed with Mandela and the change people are advocation toward open access to research knowledge. She shows a worldmapper.org map of countries distorted by the amount of (copyrighted) scientific research publications. South Africa looks small. She blames this on South Africa’s willingness to uphold colonial traditions in copyright law and norms in knowledge dissemination. She says this happens almost unquestioningly, and in South Africa to rise in the research world you are expected to publish in ‘international’ journals – the prestigious journals are not South African, she says (I am familiar with this attitude from my own experience in Canada. The top American journals and schools were considered the holy grail. When I asked about attending a top American graduate school I was laughed at by a professor and told that maybe it could happen, if perhaps I had an Olympic gold medal.) She states that for real change in this area to come about people have to recognize that they must mediate a “complex meshing” of policies: at the university level, and the various government levels, norms and the individual scientist level… just as Mandela had to mediate a large number of complex policies at a variety of different levels in order to bring about the change he did.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

As November 2008 draws near, the fundraising teams of both presidential campaigns continue to devise new methods for increasing their cash-flow. Articles like “Online GOP is playing Catch-Up,” and Obama’s “Amazing Money Machine” have been hitting headlines as the media continues to compare candidates’ ability to raise funds through digital means. Last month, the Atlantic reported that of the $55 million that Obama raised during February, $45 million of it was collected over the Internet. And the Washington Post recently revealed that the GOP is hiring “technocrats” to aid its e-campaign financing efforts.

Just as the Internet has dictated the course of presidential electoral politics – through email, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, and of course blogging – so too, has it affected political fundraising, giving new meaning to “campaign-finance reform.” Fundraising tools are becoming widely accessible to voters online, including: making donations by the click of a button, signing up for a subscription model, or establishing one’s own fundraising page, as Obama’s campaign has successfully done. Other examples of how the Internet has helped candidates rake in the cash? Representative Ron Paul set a GOP fundraising record through overwhelming support from the Internet community tied to his commemoration of Guy Fawkes Day; and the online gambling community helped fuel Senator Dodd’s Presidential aspirations by playing games of online poker, providing his campaign with more money in a year, than it had received since 1997. As those at iStockAnalyst recently noted, “In general, online contributions offer two things TV spots and phone banks cannot: an interactive relationship between the contributor and the candidate and an easy way to donate small amounts.”

Bottom line: It’s not only efficient, it’s easy, and anyone can do it. Web sites such as Fundable.com, OnlineFundraiser.com, and FastTrack Fundraising, are allowing citizens other than presidential candidates and their “online political operatives” to gain access to public funding. The trend of online fundraising has the potential to, as Yochai Benkler would say, “decentralize democratic discourse.” By providing an accessible alternative to the top-down hierarchy of political fundraising, web-based fundraising tools are giving more people a voice, and the resources, to participate in democratic forums.