Antony Loewenstein

My following article appears on the Global Voices Advocacy site:

The issue of internet censorship generally involves countries deemed non-democratic or “repressive” (something I discuss in my new book, The Blogging Revolution.) We regularly read reports about the regimes in China or Iran blocking countless “subversive” websites for overtly political gain.

Alas, a growing number of nations in the West are examining the possibility of censoring sites that allegedly harm society. France and Germany are leading the way and the United States is not far behind.

We can now add Australia to the list.

The OpenNet Initiative reported this week:

Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government’s pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts say.

Under the government’s $125.8 million Plan for Cyber-Safety, users can switch between two blacklists which block content inappropriate for children, and a separate list which blocks illegal material.

Pundits say consumers have been lulled into believing the opt-out proviso would remove content filtering altogether.

The government will iron-out policy and implementation of the Internet content filtering software following an upcoming trial of the technology, according to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

A spokesman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the filters will be mandatory for all Australians.

Ever since Australia elected a new Prime Minister in late 2007, leader Kevin Rudd has openly discussed introducing such proposals (something I explained in more detail during my speech to the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest this year.)

The primary problem with the proposal is its inefficiency and lack of flexibility (something already argued by watchers.) To make matters worse, the government has trailed this web filtering in certain states and failure was the result.

So why move forward? Leading Australian blogger on this issue, Somebody Think of the Children, says it best:

Criminals accessing child abuse websites will still be able to do so and the horrendous production and distribution of child abuse material online and off will continue. Why does the government think censors are the ones who can fix this and not law enforcement? Mandatory ISP filtering is about protecting votes, not children.

Disturbingly, the proposals have received virtually no media attention in Australia though ISPs are reportedly unsure whether to participate in the program, “depending on the nature of the trials”, according to one major player.

Vigilance on internet censorship is required across the globe, even in “democratic” nations.

My following interview by Hamid Tehrani for Global Voices was published today:

Antony Loewenstein, a Sydney-based freelance journalist and blogger, has recently published his new book: The Blogging Revolution. This book talks about the impact of blogging on six countries: Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, China and Cuba.

He says:

I chose the six countries in the book because they are routinely referred to in the West as “enemies” or “allies” of Washington and we were rarely gaining true insights into life for average citizens, away from stories about “terrorism”. I wanted to talk to bloggers, writers, dissidents, politicians and citizens and hear their stories, removed from “official” perspectives.

Antony attended the Global Voices Summit 2008 in Budapest as a panelist. You can find several references to Global Voices in his book.

I interviewed him about the book:

Q: Before starting your trip to Iran, you wrote that you were skeptical that the internet on its own can bring real revolutionary change to this country. What do you mean by revolutionary change? And what do you think now?

The concept of revolution is a fluid term. I met few people in my travels that wanted great shifts in their country. My book profiles a number of dissidents and bloggers across the globe who are striving for political, social and moral change – including Saudi Arabia’s most famous blogger, Fouad Al-Farhan, recently released from prison for challenging his nation’s nepotistic rule – but they recognize that only a tiny minority of citizens would join them in massive upheavals.

The internet cannot on its own bring large change, but it can facilitate and empower people to find their voice and campaign openly. No technology has existed before the web to do this. I don’t idealise the internet, nor believe Western-style democracy is the goal of people in the countries I visited. Foreign meddling is largely resented, though opening up the lines of communication with Westerners is welcomed.

In Iran, after nearly thirty years of revolution, most young people I met were exhausted; what they don’t want is to be bombed by the US or Israel.

Q: You quoted an Iranian journalist who worked with international news agencies, and said that foreign media in Iran are only interested in nuclear issues and Al–Qaida. Don’t you think it is the same in other countries? After all, Iranians are more interested in the US elections than the American health care system. How do you see the role of blogs in covering the less “hot” issues in Iran?

Western media is currently in a massive crisis of confidence. Resources are declining, fewer journalists are being employed and localism is being celebrated. It’s therefore not surprising, though regrettable, that so many stories in our press about a place such as Iran is obsessed with Ahmadinejad, terrorism, Iraq or human rights. These are all vitally important issues, but they don’t define the place.

My book reveals a side of Iran that is rarely seen in our terrorism-obsessed media.

Living in Sydney, Australia, I see daily the obsession with the US election, as if we all have real influence over Barack Obama or John McCain’s campaigns.

Blogs in so-called repressive regimes cover issues that time-constrained and narrow Western journalists usually do not. For this reason alone, they should be discussed and promoted.

Q: Are there any real commonalities between the Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian and Saudi Arabian blogospheres, or any radical differences?

The Iranian and Egyptian blogospheres are large and growing, and influencing the political process. The regimes, recognizing this, are increasingly imprisoning bloggers and activists to try and silence them. International solidarity, from other bloggers and certain governments, is making the job of repressive regimes more difficult. Imprisoned bloggers won’t be forgotten.

I was impressed with the depth and diversity of the voices in both Egypt and Iran, something I feature extensively in the book, from the left to the right, women, activists and Islamists. Frankly, this scene is far more engaged than in many Western nations.

In Saudi Arabia, the blogosphere is less developed though still remains active. Censorship of “pornographic” sites is limited, though the regime is starting to fear the power of activists. Reading female bloggers – as a gender they’re actively marginalized in society – is refreshing if we want to understand this previously “silenced” group.

Q: What were the biggest challenges you faced writing this book and doing your research?

Gaining full access to some of the countries was challenging. Investigating the role of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other Western multinational firms and their collusion in web censorship in a state such as China. Protecting my sources was equally important. I took precautions before I contacted bloggers in most countries and when I arrived there.

A key aim of the book was to move away from the traditional role of Western journalist as a filter of quality. In every featured country, my perspective is unavoidable, of course, but I was determined to redefine my position in relation to the people I was interviewing. Their voices were far more important than mine.

Q: What do you think about the role of Global Voices in helping people learn about unheard voices? Any ideas for how to make Global Voices more efficient?

The strength of Global Voices is its ability to educate readers across the world about different countries and cultures, often issues and perspectives ignored by the myopic Western media. Language remains a key problem, however. More effort should be placed into finding connections between the West and the rest because the internet is currently a space where these two worlds rarely interact.

My following article appears in the US magazine The Nation on the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit and the issue of web repression:

During the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008–sponsored by Harvard University and Google in Budapest, Hungary, in late June, and attended by over 200 bloggers, human rights activists, writers, journalists, hackers and IT experts from every corner of the globe–one participant joked that it was worthwhile buying domain names for dissidents likely to be imprisoned. “Just get them with ‘Free (insert name here).com,’ ” he said.

A recent University of Washington report found that 64 people have been arrested for blogging their political views since 2003. Three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues in 2007 than in 2006. More than half of the arrests since 2003 were made in Iran, China and Egypt. Internet censorship has become a cause with global relevance.

I was invited to present a paper at the two-day event that covered the research for my forthcoming book, The Blogging Revolution, on the Internet in repressive regimes, plans by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to combat Internet child pornography, and my work with Amnesty International Australia on its campaign against Chinese web filtering, Uncensor.

The goal of Global Voices, started in late 2004, is to provide insights into non-Western nations to Western audiences through country-specific blogs. The last years have seen its agenda expand to include a translation service for multiple languages, Global Voices Lingua , support for minorities in developing nations (the Rising Voices project) and Voices without Votes, the chance for global citizens to comment on the 2008 US presidential election campaign in every country except America.

The Budapest summit featured bloggers and activists from places as diverse as Madagascar, India, Belarus, Kenya, Pakistan, Singapore, Bangladesh, Armenia, Egypt, Iran and China. It was constantly stressed that although the Internet can’t bring democratic reform on its own– only citizens of a country have the right to determine a political system, not outside forces–it is allowing on-the-ground organizations to challenge corruption, fraudulent elections and police-led torture. Populations are being empowered.

Although everybody I met came from varied backgrounds, from the elites to indigenous communities using new technology to find a voice in a country like Bolivia, the sense of community was palpable. What can an Australian journalist like myself really understand about democratic struggles in Iran and Bangladesh? By sharing stories, it soon became clear that many speakers related to others on the opposite side of the globe. Tools such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, e-mail, FeedBurner and text messaging were common denominators used by a minority online community to challenge state-run, media lies.

Nobody talked about revolution or massive social change, but rather the ability to become engaged in a process usually reserved for an unelected class. In Morocco, for example, bloggers filmed corrupt policemen taking bribes and posted them on YouTube. “Targuist Sniper” inspired many others to act similarly, and the short videos have been watched millions of times. One female Egyptian blogger posted photos of police torture by tagging her entries with the names of the accused officials. Some of this evidence was used in a court of law. Two close US allies were forced to publicly respond to internal pressure.

Numerous sessions revealed insights into societies all too easily categorized as oppressive. Iranian exile Hamid Tehrani revealed that the regime, now with one of the most effective web-filtering systems outside of China, bans many anti-George W. Bush sites such as Juan Cole’s Informed Comment and The Huffington Post but allows a neocon and prowar site such as Pajamas Media to remain uncensored. It was a typically illogical move.

Only last week Iranian members of parliament announced a draft bill that aims to “toughen punishment for disturbing mental security in society.” The text of the bill would add “establishing websites and weblogs promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy” to the list of crimes punishable by execution.

The perception of the Internet in various countries remains troubling. Singaporean blogger Au Wai Pang said that the tool is “free” in his country, “but people behave like it is not.” Self-censorship is a key barrier to open debate. Au reminded the Budapest audience that technology isn’t always the answer to censorship issues. “How do you change people’s minds,” he asked, “[for] many who don’t believe in a society with free speech?” Nothing beats face-to-face interaction, but the web has become a space where citizens can voice their opinions and have them respected often for the first time.

A number of prominent Kenyan bloggers, including Ory Okolloh and Daudi Were, discussed the role of new technology in the aftermath of the stolen election in late 2007. With only 7-10 percent web penetration in the country, bloggers on election day woke up early to film people waiting patiently in line to vote. Some were even embedded with foreign observers and could immediately report, via SMS and Twitter, irregularities in the counting process. International support in the Diaspora was crucial to highlight this relatively stable nation descend into ethnic chaos.

Blogger Luis Carlos Diaz, from Venezuela, debunked many of the Western myths about President Hugo Chávez. “The problem is we have too much petroleum,” Diaz lamented. Although critical of many of his policies, Diaz said that Chávez was a democratically elected leader who wasn’t quashing freedom of speech. “Voting is a sport in Venezuela,” he said. To remain awake during the weekly eight-hour diatribes by Chávez on state television, bloggers were providing an alternative perspective on issues that matter to average citizens, such as poverty, housing and education. Diaz said he’d recently spoken to workers whose job is to transcribe Chávez’s speeches. They usually last around 3,000 pages every week.

Unsurprisingly, China featured prominently in the sessions. Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN journalist and now academic in Hong Kong, stressed that debate had to progress past who is more “brainwashed,” Western or Chinese audiences. One of the key translators of Chinese blog posts for Global Voices, John Kennedy, challenged his audience by asking whether the growing Western anger against the Chinese people was justified. Was nationalism as great an influence as claimed? Was self-determination for Tibet so unacceptable in the motherland? Are Chinese netizens any more thin-skinned than Westerners when attacked online for their opinions?

Despite these valid questions, one of China’s leading dissidents, Isaac Mao, wished that the Chinese mob mentality online on issues of national importance wasn’t so strong. He stressed that although the concept of freedom of speech is paramount in the West, many other societies place greater emphasis on the rule of law and fighting corruption.

Mao, who launched Digital Nomads to host hundreds of independent blogs away from prying authoritarian rule, feared citizens in prosperous, Western citizens rarely understood the “crimes of omission” in their own societies. “They don’t get why the non-Western world wants to talk about issues that the Western largely ignores,” Mao said, “such as poverty and environmental degradation.” A major theme of the event was highlighted. Too few bloggers in the West were bridging the information gap between different societies and preferred to preach rather than listen.

The role of blogs in China is more than simply reacting to perceived Western slights. Instead, many netizens may not be calling for the dissolution of the Communist Party or planning a revolution, but they’re been given far more freedoms today than five years ago. Mirroring what I found during my research in China last year, very few Chinese bloggers appear upset with the excessive filtering (though some are unaware what they’re missing out on.) This doesn’t mean, however, that the apparent blocking of parts of Facebook isn’t annoying for many users or the creeping Olympic crackdown.

It was encouraging to hear from IT insiders that many employees of companies such as Google and Yahoo feel distinctly uncomfortable with the role their companies play in a country such as China and regularly leak material about their actions anonymously and develop tools to allow an e-mail program such as Gmail to be used securely, away from the prying eyes of censorious regimes.

The Budapest conference showed yet again that the mainstream media remains woefully under-prepared and unwilling to cover vast swathes of the world. Blogging and citizen journalism therefore provides an essential alternative to the daily obsession in much of our media with re-printing government and corporate spin as news.

What would a truly global blogging community look like?

Street sparklers, expatriate bloggers, and foodseeking.

(Aka known as finding connections between writing under repression, consuming beautiful food and celebrating the good things in life.)

My following article appeared in yesterday’s edition of Crikey:

64 people have been arrested for blogging their views since 2003, according to a recent University of Washington report. Three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues in 2007 than the year before. More than half of all the arrests since 2003 were made in China, Egypt and Iran. Internet censorship has become a key global concern.

These issues — and more – were discussed at the recent Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008, held in Budapest. The aim of the two-day event, sponsored in part by Harvard University and Google, was to bring 200 writers, dissidents, bloggers, human rights activists and citizen journalists from across the world to discuss the role of Western multinationals in web filtering — and how bloggers are increasingly challenging the narrow focus of the mainstream media and creating alternative, online spaces for minorities (in, say, Bolivia and Syria) to transmit their messages to the world.

Representatives from various countries, including Madagascar, Venezuela, Kenya, China and Egypt, gave the event a wonderfully diverse flavour but common themes emerged. Everybody wants to be heard. And using YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, FeedBurner, blogs, mobile phones, Facebook and LiveMotion in countries such as Pakistan, Armenia, Belarus and Singapore is one way to circumvent the authoritarian impulse of often US-backed dictatorships.

It was constantly stressed that the internet can’t bring real democratic reform on its own but the web has become an invaluable organising tool to generate political change. Of course, some bloggers just want to write about food, fashion and fast cars.

One session, “The Wired Electorate in Emerging Democracies”, featured Iranian-exile Hamid Tehrani (whose report on the country’s anti-Semitic bloggers offers a sobering perspective on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s pernicious influence). Tehrani argued that Iran’s reformist bloggers, often seen in the West as moderates, have become relatively unpopular and disorganised. They are “serial losers” who are unlikely to regain power any time soon.

Armenian journalist Onnik Krikorian in his country saw the use of YouTube to highlight irregularities such as vote stuffing which forced the regime to defend its actions to the world. Activists also posted YouTube footage of police shooting demonstrators.

Another session, “When Biases Meet Biases”, discussed the ways in which the troubles over Tibet and the Beijing Games have left Chinese netizens and Western audiences more distant than ever. Leading US-based dissident Xiao Qiang said that the internet, rather than finding rational voices over sensitive issues, actually pushed ideologies and opinions to extremes. Calls were made for greater understanding of opposing positions. For example, are most Chinese really opposed to Tibetan self-determination, or are only the loudest nationalists being heard?

Antony Loewenstein was invited to present a paper on the importance of NGOs in assisting on-the-ground activists, the proposed Rudd-government plan to censor the web and his work with Amnesty International Australia on its Uncensor campaign about internet repression in China in this Olympic year. His speech can be found here.

My latest New Matilda column is about the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest last week:

Evgeny Morozov, Open Democracy, June 30:

The Budapest [Global Voices] gathering represents one of the major benefits of today’s internet revolution: the radical democratisation of the global flow of ideas. The technology, the ideas and the processes that have made possible blogs, social networks, and collaborative projects like Wikipedia also give many unconventional thinkers previously consigned to the margins of public life a platform that enables them to be heard by a dedicated (if often tiny) audience. The academic, blogger and pundit Daniel W Drezner has called this new generation – free from the usual constraints of the academia, self-employed, and armed with Google search – “Public Intellectuals 2.0″.

But is it “Public Intellectuals 2.0” or “Dissidents 2.0″? The Budapest experience suggests that the movement slowly emerging on the margins of the blogosphere shares much in common with an older generation of those who sought to “speak truth to power”. The city’s mayor Gábor Demszky – a communist-era dissident – was one of the first people to welcome some Global Voices bloggers. The early stencils used to copy anti-government materials in east-central Europe, now housed in the Open Society archives in Budapest, add to the sense that there are similarities between blogging and samizdat. It may be just a matter of time before an Apple or a Lenovo laptop belonging to a Belarusian or an Uzbek dissident-blogger finds a well-deserved placed next to these stencils.

I connected with many activists and bloggers from around the world at last week’s Global Voices Citizen Summit 2008 in Budapest.

During the event, I was interviewed by the BBC Radio program, IPM, a weekly show about the web and technology. This story featured interviews with dissidents from various nations, telling their stories of using the web to challenge authoritarianism. I was asked about my research for the forthcoming book, The Blogging Revolution:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

My following article appears in the Amnesty International Australia’s Uncensor campaign about human rights in China:

Westerners must look at China in all its diversity, including voices of reason, writes Antony Loewenstein

During last week’s Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest, Hungary, where I presented a paper on the role of the internet in repressive regimes, there was much discussion about web issues in this Chinese Olympic year. The main conclusion was that the West fundamentally misunderstands the realities of the issue.

Take Isaac Mao, a leading blog pioneer in China. He didn’t deny the reality of major governmental filtering of sensitive material but questioned the response of Western elites to it. “We don’t have professional media in China”, Mao said. Propaganda is the name of the game, but the web is changing the rules.

CNN was accused of showing bias against the Chinese people during the Tibetan protests earlier in the year. A website, anti-CNN.com, was established to counter these perceived inaccuracies. Mao said that CNN, after the ferocious attacks, altered its coverage to better reflect the sensibilities of the Chinese people. Nobody knows if CNN was deliberately smearing China – Hong Kong academic Rebecca MacKinnon said that it might just have been the work of lowly interns at the station – but many speakers, including Mao, said that the West’s obsession with freedom of speech was often distorting our understanding of the situation.

Mao told the 200 activists, dissidents, human rights campaigners, bloggers and journalists from dozens of countries around the world, such as Kenya, Singapore, Iran, Yemen and Pakistan, that in many parts of the world the rule of law and ending corruption were far more important values.

John Kennedy, the leading translator of Chinese blog posts for Global Voices, said that it was important for Westerners to understand that the Chinese blogosphere wasn’t homogenous and displayed far more opinions than many thought. How much do we really know about general Chinese attitudes to Tibetan self-determination? Is the perception of Chinese netizens being thin-skinned really accurate and different to Westerners being attacked by another society and reacting accordingly?

While leading US-based dissident Xiao Qiang argued that the internet this year had played a key role in pushing ideologies and opinions to the extreme, Kennedy reminded us that many Chinese bloggers sided with the protesting Burmese monks in 2007. In other words, it all depends on who is pushing the authoritarianism.

Former CNN journalist Rebecca MacKinnon talked about a study conducted by Dave Lyons on his Mutant Palm blog. It shows how, compared to coverage of the 2004 Athens Games, “practically none of the sites that exist in China, written in English, are linked to or from the major English Olympics sites outside China. China may be coming out to the world this Olympics, but apparently their webpages haven’t.” We ignore Chinese voices at our peril.

Of course, with just over one month until the start of the Beijing Games, China continues to harass dissidents while imposing onerous visa restrictions on visitors. Most China experts at the Budapest conference told me that Beijing would now be expecting fairly negative global press coverage over the coming two months, considering the PR disasters in 2008.

We have to find new ways to better communicate with Chinese netizens and not ask, as MacKinnon said, “who is more brainwashed?” The emergence of websites with “alternative” versions of reality – the Chinese view and the Western-approved version – is a worrying development for a medium that should unite, rather than divide, people.

Fighting internet repression in Yemen.

What was discussed at the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 in Budapest last week.