Internet & Democracy Blog

Hamid Tehrani over at Global Voices reports that the Iranian opposition plans to turn Quds Day, a day which many in the region mark to show their solidarity with Palestinians, into a day for supporting the protest movement as well. NiaclNsight also notes:

The 30th anniversary of the International Day of Quds will be Green this year, according to reformist websites in Iran. Opposition leaders Karroubi, Khatami, and Mousavi have all confirmed their participation in this important ceremony, which is traditionally held in every city of Iran.

Our research on the Arabic blogosphere showed that Palestine was the one issue that united the entire blogosphere, in particular last year’s war in Gaza, as well as Quds day and other pro-Palestine events such as Nakba Day, which marks the 1948 exodus from Palestine. My informal discussions with Arabic bloggers have also indicated strong support in that part of the Middle Eastern blogosphere for Iranian protesters after the election, so Friday has the potential to turn into a day of solidarity with the Iranian protest movement across the region. In an attempt to undercut their plans, the Iranian regime has banned opposition cleric Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who normally speaks at Friday prayers on Quds day, from doing so this year.

Prosecutors in Iran have indicted a student leader for using the Internet to spread false information and provoke unrest during election protests. The New York Times reports:

State television reported the indictment on Monday of a prominent student leader, Abdullah Momeni, who is accused of “spreading reports via Internet to provoke the unrest.” Reading from the indictment, Tehran’s deputy prosecutor, Ali Ahmad Akbari, said that that Facebook, the Internet and YouTube were “used as effective tools to organize illegal gatherings and to spread false information,” the ISNA student news agency reported.

The Times also reports that opposition leader Mehdi Karoubi struck back at the judicial panel that found no cases of abuse or rape of protesters in Iranian jails with more evidence and testimonials from victims. Hamid Tehrani also recently pointed to a number of sites that are commemorating the dozens of protesters that were killed after the election.

Global Voices Advocacy tells us that China’s latest attempt to control the Internet – ‘Blue Dam’ – became active on September 13, and the government is requiring ISPs to use the software or face punishment. Blue Dam is an ISP-level surveillance application that is, apparently, meant to solve many of the problems stemming from the failed launch of Green Dam, which the Chinese government initially insisted must be installed on all PCs sold in China, even those sold by foreign companies, and even though large chunks of the code were stolen from existing, patented software applications.

Carrying surveillance out at the ISP level follows the methodology China employs to filter blogs, as Rebecca McKinnon (the go to source on Chinese Internet issues) has shown, by forcing ISPs to do much of the dirty work of the censors. This is also not dissimilar from how Russia apparently monitors Internet activity. How effective any government will be at monitoring the work of millions of Internet users remains to be seen, but it is certainly a development free speech advocates are going to be concerned about, and could lead to another backlash by Chinese Internet users.

In the Times Week in Review Anand Giriharadas seems surprised that the Obama team has had more success with the Internet during the campaign than in the White House. As the article tells us, the results of the “Citizens’ Briefing Book,” an online policy proposal initiative, were less than one might have hoped for:

In the middle of two wars and an economic meltdown, the highest-ranking idea was to legalize marijuana, an idea nearly twice as popular as repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. Legalizing online poker topped the technology ideas, twice as popular as nationwide wi-fi. Revoking the Church of Scientology’s tax-exempt status garnered three times more votes than raising funding for childhood cancer.

I was not aware that the legalizing marijuana lobby was so well organized online, but less surprised by the popularity of online poker or anti-Scientology efforts: Both of those movements have an larger presence on the Internet than outside it, in particular the anonymous movement against Scientology.

The Internet is great at organizing campaigns and protests (in the US and abroad), but it will not, at least in the near term, have a huge impact on day to day governance in the way that some in the tech field had hoped. This is particularly true for those that believed the Internet would lead to direct democracy and fundamentally change our form of government in the US. It won’t. Most democratic societies have republican forms of government where we elect representatives to carry out the day to day affairs of state – because for all the problems its problems, this is still the best way to run things when the rest of us have full time jobs. This is more than anything an indictment of direct democracy as opposed to an indictment of the Internet. One need look no further than the mess that Californian voters have created by trying to manage a budget process at the ballot box – this has lead to a situation where nobody wants to pay higher taxes or have deficits, but everyone, especially during the economic meltdown, wants more government services. It’s impossible.

This doesn’t mean that the Internet isn’t having a huge impact on democracy, from campaigns to government transparency to allowing new voices into the process to increased fact checking of government, media and interest groups. Just don’t expect direct democracy to take hold because of technological innovation.

Not much in the way of blog posts this week due to travel and conference presentations. Here are some recent good reads to tide you over until next week:

NPR shares a podcast from a retired firefighter who lost both of his sons, eight years ago today, at the World Trade Center.

UN Dispatch and Evgeny Morozov look at the dust up over GQ Russia’s choice to not publish an article linking the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings to the war in Chechnya and Putin’s election.

Profy looks at VKontakte’s (the Russian version of facebook) plans to expand globally.

The Atlantic wonders if innovation will force Google to fall from the tech heights, just as Microsoft and IBM did before it.

Ethan Zuckerman summarizes Hamid Tehraini’s analysis of social media in Iran, while the Wonk Room shoots holes in the idea that Obama’s outreach has strengthened Iranian hardliners.

The New York Times on a blow to anonymity in the Chinese Internet.

And Foreign Policy shows how pigeons are faster than the South African Internet.

For those that haven’t made it through our 70 page paper on the Arabic blogosphere, we’ve got a digestible two page version in the latest Middle East Institute Bulletin, which is focused this quarter on new media in the Middle East, an issue near and dear to our hearts. Here is one of the many interesting findings:

Blogs are an integral part of the Arabic media ecosystem. We found that bloggers link to Web 2.0 sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia (both the 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. Most national media outlets do not have much reach outside of their respective national clusters.

Returning to YouTube, we found that Arabic bloggers tend to prefer politically oriented videos to cultural ones. Videos related to the conflict in Gaza and the throwing of shoes at George W. Bush in Iraq are popular across the entire blogosphere, while clips related to domestic political issues are linked to more heavily by the various national clusters, such as Kuwaiti parliamentary campaign videos.

And I continue to be struck by what we did not find:

While much has been made of Iraqi bloggers during ongoing debates about the Iraq war, this group does not figure prominently in the Arabic blogosphere. Rather, they are deeply integrated into the English Bridge group. This may be because many Iraqi bloggers write in English and have many inbound links from US think tanks, journalists, and partisan political bloggers (“Iraq the Model” on the right, “Riverbend” on the left, for example), rather than mainly writing for a domestic public. We also did not find any cluster of bloggers dedicated to violent extremism.

Check it out (here).

While there is still a lot of English content on the Web, the percentage is shrinking fast, and those that want to understand what the rest of the world is talking about online have a potentially powerful new tool on their hands with Google translate, which has just added nine more languages: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish.

Icelandic? Yiddish? Hugh?

It turns out that Google chooses languages based on the amount of content available in those languages, not the number of speakers of a language or foreign policy concerns. As the Google Research blog says:

We’ve found that one of the most important factors in adding new languages to our system is the ability to find large amounts of translated documents from which our system automatically learns how to translate. As a result, the set of languages that we’ve been able to develop is more closely tied to the size of the web presence of a language and less to the number of speakers of the language.

Still, I’m excited by the project and the promised improvement in translation capacity over time, if that turns out to be true, and was quite happy when they added a beta version of Persian to the mix of languages earlier this summer (maybe Google isn’t totally immune foreign policy considerations after all).

As someone who has invested a lot of time trying to learn a foreign language or two (Russian has been my primary war of attrition), I always felt comfort in the fact that machines will never be able to translate very well. The results from most machine translators are often more humorous than useful. So, I was fairly impressed at how fast Google translate churns out a translation, if not necessarily with the quality of the end product. While the translation is better than most machine translators, it’s still not good enough to use free of a basic understanding of the language you are translating from if you want anything more than a general sense of an article or blog post (at least in Russian – I understand the quality varies among different languages). Humans (at least for now) are still better than computers at some things – but I applaud Google’s efforts so far on this one.

The media’s love affair with Facebook may be officially over. As Virginia Heffernan writes in the Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.

Yet she admits that “the exodus is not evident” in the numbers, as the site is still adding users and had nearly 88 million unique visitors in July. Things, it seems, aren’t that bad.

But the more important question, in my view, is if Facebook, Myspace, and others like it are just the cool new toy that nobody wants to play with anymore, or is there something more enduring about social networking platforms. Given the number of new tools that have taken their own slant on social networking (Good Reads, for example), the benefit that many users still see in occasional, passive networking for professional or personal reasons and perhaps most importantly, the potential for sites to start to figure out how to sustain themselves or (gasp) turn a profit by selling targeted advertising or information on networks of users to sponsors (even if that commercialization will drive some away), I’d say the end isn’t here just yet.

We also shouldn’t forget that not all societies are equal when it comes to social networking. Italians are crazy about Facebook if my former colleague Corinna is any indication, and as we’ve written here recently, Russians are the top social networkers in the world, starting with vkontakte, initially a carbon copy of Facebook. And even before it was translated into Arabic, Facebook had over 9 million users in Egypt. Even if the US market starts to dry up, Facebook and sites like it have a number of overseas markets to grow into; that is if homegrown versions don’t get there first. In short, I don’t think we’ve heard anything like the death knell of social networking, or even Facebook. If only we could ponder the same thing about email.

In today’s Times Michael Slackman highlights how the Internet has led to greater pluralism in political and religious debates in Egypt by profiling Gamal al-Banna, a liberal religious thinker who just happens to be the brother of the decidedly less liberal Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hassan al-Banna. Slackman writes that although Gamal al-Banna been sharing his ideas publicly for years:

…only now, he said, does he have the chance to be heard widely. It is not that a majority agrees with him; it is not that the tide is shifting to a more moderate interpretative view of religion; it is just that the rise of relatively independent media — like privately owned newspapers, satellite television channels and the Internet — has given him access to a broader audience.

Of course, the Internet alone isn’t responsible for the changes that take place in any society. Slackman notes:

Several factors have changed the public debate and erased some of the fear associated with challenging conventional orthodoxy, political analysts, academics and social activists said. These include a disillusionment and growing rejection of the more radical Islamic ideology associated with Al Qaeda, they said. At the same time, President Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world has quieted the accusation that the United States is at war with Islam, making it easier for liberal Muslims to promote more Western secular ideas, Egyptian political analysts said.

Our research into the Arabic blogosphere found that Egypt does indeed have large, relatively open and in many ways oppositional blogosphere. The debates within the Muslim Brotherhood cluster of bloggers, where younger members challenge the old guard on the goals and future direction of the Muslim Brotherhood, are some of the most interesting in the online Middle East, because they show how the Internet has the power to change existing institutions and the way decisions are made in those previously hierarchical, top-down institutions. As we wrote in our paper:

The Muslim Brotherhood that mobilizes mindshare in the networked public sphere is no longer the same Muslim Brotherhood. As we see with advocacy organizations in the United States, or Shi’a religious students in Iran, the move to Internet modes of communication can alter the forms of organization among people committed to similar goals, ideas, and values. The Internet does not just promise (or threaten) to change the balance of power among players on the field, it changes the field and changes the players too.

Hamid Tehrani over at Global Voices reports today that Mohammad Ali Abtahi, the former vice president and well known blogger whose gaunt appearance in his show trial has spread virally across the Internet as proof that he has been tortured, is now being forced to blog from prison. Hamid summarizes the post:

“He says that the interrogation continues but he has very friendly relation with interrogator and protesters in prison know that there was no significant fraud in Iran’s presidential election.”

Yeah, right.

Clearly, his captors haven’t gotten the memo that the show trials, forced confessions and now blogging at gunpoint just aren’t working like they used to. As Laura Secor writes in this week’s New Yorker:

“Show trials have been staged before, most notably in Moscow in the nineteen-thirties. Typically, such rituals purge élites and scare the populace. They are the prelude to submission. Iran’s show trials, so far, have failed to accrue this fearsome power. In part, this is because the accused are connected to a mass movement: Iranians whose democratic aspirations have evolved organically within the culture of the Islamic Republic. It is one thing to persuade citizens that a narrow band of apparatchiks are enemies of the state. It is quite another to claim that a political agenda with broad support—for popular sovereignty, human rights, due process, freedom of speech—has been covertly planted by foreigners.”

Secor highlights later how the Iranians, and indeed those from around the world, have taken to the Internet to mock the entire show trial process and the ridiculous confessions that their interrogators have made up for them, kicked off by satarist Ebrahim Nabavi’s stripped pajama confession that he has met with the CIA, imported green velvet and cavorted with the likes of Angelina Jolie. As Secor concludes, “…the spectacle that was meant to produce compliance and terror instead has stoked fury and derision.”