Microsoft founder Bill Gates seems a little too keen to keep the Chinese authorities as friends by grossly ignoring the Communist state’s sophisticated censorship program:
You’ve got to decide: do you want to obey the laws of the countries you’re in or not? If not, you may not end up doing business there. Chinese efforts to censor the internet have been very limited. It’s easy to go around it, so I think keeping the internet thriving there is very important.
My following article appears today on ABC Unleashed/The Drum:
Google has threatened to withdraw entirely from China in protest at the authoritarian regime’s oppressive online censorship and continuing attempts by Chinese hackers to gain sensitive information of local human rights workers.
Perhaps most significantly, Google’s Chinse search engine, Google.cn, now allows once banned material to be displayed, such as images of the brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square. A few people even placed flowers outside the company’s offices in Beijing as a sign of respect and perhaps admiration for the company’s position.
It is a highly unusual move by a multinational with roughly 30 percent market share in an internet market of over 350 million people, the largest in the world. Furthermore, it recognises the increasing pressure placed on the company by Communist officials, including the banning of YouTube, attempts to illegally gain corporate information and persistent efforts by hackers to discover the private details of dissenters on Gmail.
Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at the Open Space Institute and an expert on the Chinese Internet, told the New York Times that, “Unless they turn themselves into a Chinese company, Google could not win. The company has clearly put its foot down and said enough is enough.”
A Google spokesman wrote in a blog posting on 12 January:
“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered – combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web – have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”
News reports indicate that the Obama administration has been in negotiations with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco, companies with a long history of assisting Beijing in its censorship program, to implement a far-reaching initiative to help citizens in repressive regimes access banned online information. China is only the worst culprit of this growing trend; Iran is not far behind, especially since last year’s disputed election.
Despite Google’s seemingly brave move, already praised by human rights groups around the world, questions remain whether other large web firms will join them. It should be remembered that the country’s largest search engines, such as Baidu, are Chinese-owned and remain close to the regime. They are unlikely to follow Google’s lead.
The last months have seen cyber wars within China and from the outside heat up considerably. Chinese netizens have pledged to help their Iranian colleagues while government-backed activists from Iran moved to disable Chinese websites.
Chinese writer and blogger Alice Xin Liu argued earlier this month that the banning of increasing numbers of websites by paranoid authorities was both impossible to predict and avoid. She shared the news that officials are threatening to release a “white-list” of approved websites, with foreign websites forced to register before they launched or allowed to continue online.
Although some technology writers are cynical over Google’s latest stance (“More about business than thwarting evil”, says one), the company’s relationship with the Communist regime has never been especially close. It was slammed internationally for agreeing to censorship its search engine in the first place. Google’s global standing plummeted since 2006: “On a business level, that decision to censor…was a net negative,” co-founder Sergey Brin told the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2007.
When I visited China in 2007 during research for my book, The Blogging Revolution, I found widespread mistrust of the company. Although Gmail was regarded as far safer option than Hotmail or Yahoo!, the search engine was regarded as a pale imitation of Chinese equivalents.
The Great Firewall (GFW) is an ingenious system that doesn’t actually block all banned content. Instead, explains leading internet censorship expert Nart Villeneuve, “the GFW doesn’t have to be 100% technically effective, it just has to serve as a reminder to those in China about what content is acceptable and that which should be avoided. The objective is to influence behaviour toward self-censorship, so that most will not actively seek out banned information or the means to bypass controls and access it.”
My own research in China found a remarkable amount of material still existed that could be deemed controversial. Sexual content, political writings and corruption discussions remained available. The last decade has seen an explosion of once-forbidden issues now analysed, challenged and framed in the Chinese blogosphere. Crusading journalism is still possible in today’s China. This is not to deny the pervasive censorship regime but to highlight a more nuanced view of Beijing’s attitude towards its citizens.
The wider context for this story is the economic rise of China; the elephant in the room between Washington and Beijing. America fears a business and political rival and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded this week that China explains its ongoing cyber-attacks against Google and other firms. It was yet another warning from the super-power to the competitor snapping at its heels.
Veteran China watcher James Fallows argues that the significance of Google’s decision is the challenge to China’s “Bush-Cheney era”. China “is on a path at the moment that courts resistance around the world” but is not a threat to American hegemony.
The real agenda behind Google’s decision may never be known but it is unlikely to change in the short-term the Communist Party’s stranglehold on information. If the move forces Western companies to more closely examine their motives and practices in the dictatorship and the collusion that inevitably comes with this process, Google will have recovered a modicum of respect.
My book The Blogging Revolution thoroughly examines the complicity of Western multinationals such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in assisting online censorship in oppressive regimes.
Nicholas Kristof in his blog on the New York Times discovers how shocking this situation has become. Lesson for the day; never trust the word of corporate executives (especially when we learn today that Microsoft may help News Corporation remove its content from Google, an utterly pointless act in an age of massive, online information):
Critics have accused President Obama of kowtowing to Chinese leaders, by failing to meet dissidents, toning down his criticisms and delaying a meeting with the Dalai Lama. On balance, I think that criticism is premature: Confrontation doesn’t help with China and can hurt, and so engagement becomes a fine line to navigate. The Obama visit wasn’t a ringing success, but neither was it a craven embarrassment.
For the latest craven kowtowing, we can look somewhere else: Microsoft and its new search engine, Bing.
Western corporations have often behaved embarrassingly in China, sacrificing any principles to ingratiate themselves with the Communist Party authorities. Yahoo was the worst, handing over information about several email account holders so that they could be arrested – and then dissembling and defending its monstrous conduct. Now Microsoft is sacrificing the integrity of Bing searches so as to cozy up to State Security in Beijing. In effect, it has chosen become part of the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus.
If you search a term on Bing that is politically sensitive in China, in English the results are legitimate. Search “Tiananmen” and you’ll find out about the army firing on pro-democracy protesters in 1989. Search Dalai Lama, Falun Gong and you also get credible results. Conduct the search in complex Chinese characters (the kind used in Taiwan and Hong Kong) and on the whole you still get authentic results.
But conduct the search with the simplified characters used in mainland China, then you get sanitized pro-Communist results. This is especially true of image searches. Magic! No Tiananmen Square massacre. The Dalai Lama becomes an oppressor. Falun Gong believers are villains, not victims.
What’s most offensive is that this is true wherever in the world the search is conducted – including in my office in New York. If Microsoft felt it had to bow to Chinese censorship within China’s borders, based on the IP address, that might be defensible. But when Microsoft skews its worldwide searches to make Hu Jintao feel better, that’s a disgrace. It becomes simply a unit of the Central Committee Propaganda Department.
The following article by Katrin Figge is published today in one of Indonesia’s largest English newspapers, The Jakarta Globe:
For a person who gets hate mail and death threats on a regular basis, Antony Loewenstein remains surprisingly cheerful.
The Jewish-Australian journalist, activist, blogger and author, who is based in Sydney, has stirred up plenty of controversy with his book “My Israel Question.” First published in 2006 and reprinted in a third edition several weeks ago, the book takes a critical look at the conflict between Israel and Palestine. As a self-proclaimed anti-Zionist and a supporter of the Palestinian cause, Loewenstein has been accused of anti-Semitism by many fellow Jews.
Ben Cubby of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote in a July review of “My Israel Question”: “To his critics, he is a ‘pro-Hezbollah cheerleader’ and ‘smouldering teen idol’ who is ‘working for the destruction of Israel’ through his ‘rabidly anti-Zionist agenda.’ ” He continued, “For a young writer whose first book has barely hit the shelves, Antony Loewenstein is quickly honing a reputation for getting under people’s skin.”
“I don’t want to suggest that I feel that my life is in jeopardy, I don’t want to exaggerate, but unfortunately, yes, I get a lot of attacks from Jewish people,” Loewenstein said during a phone interview last week, shortly before he set off for Bali and the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, which kicks off on Wednesday. It is his second visit to Bali. Loewenstein’s first time on the island was for a vacation.
“I was in Bali in March for a couple of weeks, but it was for a holiday,” Loewenstein said. “I loved it, and I am glad I am coming back and have the chance to see a bit more of the country.”
After the festival, he will visit several other cities, including Yogyakarta and Aceh, as part of a book tour. He plans to talk about the Middle East, the role of the United States in the region, Jewish identity and Palestinian nationalism.
“One of the interesting things for me about coming to the Ubud festival is to try to bridge the profound gap that exists between the English-speaking and the non-English speaking world,” he said.
He said he didn’t have much knowledge of Indonesian writers, not because he wasn’t interested, but mainly because of the language barrier.
“In the Western world, the literature of the non-English speaking countries is maybe not ignored, but certainly not highlighted as much as it should be,” he said. “I hope that in time this will change, especially with the help of a multilingual Internet.”
Loewenstein also published “The Blogging Revolution” in 2008.
“The main reason behind the book was a dissatisfaction with how the Western media reported on the rest of the world,” he said. “It started during and right after the Iraq war in 2003. It seemed to me extraordinary that in Australia and many parts of the West, there were very few Iraqi voices talking about the war.”
Internet blogs were one way for Loewenstein to get inside Iraq. He then decided to visit Cuba, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China — countries that he said are repressive but still have a vibrant and diverse Internet culture.
“There’s a great deal of online dissent in these countries,” Loewenstein said. “One of the things I wanted to talk about in the book was that the Internet on its own does not bring democracy, but what it does do in many countries, for example in Egypt, Iraq and China, is to bring issues to public attention.”
He talked to a number of people about why and how they were blogging, and especially about how they dealt with the censorship that exists in some of those countries.
“In places like China, for example, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo actually help the government to censor the Internet,” Loewenstein said. “To me, that is something profoundly disturbing that needed to be examined, while overall, I was trying to show how in the West we are willfully ignoring many voices that we could be listening to.”
He recently traveled to Israel and Palestine.
“I am very critical of the way Israel treats Palestinians, and I guess I just wanted to go there again and see it with my own eyes,” he said.
“It was despairing. The situation in Israel itself [is that] the country has moved very much to the right. In Palestine there is not much optimism despite Barack Obama coming in and talking about peace. Nothing has changed, nothing has been rebuilt.”
As someone who is Jewish, Loewenstein said, he felt profound shame about what his people were doing. This is one of the things he wants to speak about at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.
“For many people, especially in the Muslim world, there is a need to hear Jews speaking critically of Israel,” Loewenstein said. “What Israel does in Palestine is unconscionable and has to be condemned.”
Antony Loewenstein will be speaking at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival this week.
Antony Loewenstein at the festivalOctober 9 2:15 – 3:30 p.m. Writing in the New World: Obama and Dissent, with Fatima Bhutto, Antony Loewenstein and Jamal Mahjoub Chair: Michael Vatikiotis
October 11 9 – 10 a.m. In Conversation: Antony Loewenstein Chair: Dominique Schwartz 4 – 5:30 p.m. A New Frontier: Blogging, Dissent and Solidarity, with Doel CP Allisah, Dian Hartati, Antony Loewenstein and Ng Yi-Sheng Chair: Angela Meyer
We reported some time ago on the complicity of Nokia in the recent Iranian crackdown. Western multinationals have become pretty good at working with authoritarian regimes (witness Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft in China.)
The mobile phone company Nokia is being hit by a growing economic boycott in Iran as consumers sympathetic to the post-election protest movement begin targeting a string of companies deemed to be collaborating with the regime.
Wholesale vendors in the capital report that demand for Nokia handsets has fallen by as much as half in the wake of calls to boycott Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) for selling communications monitoring systems to Iran.
There are signs that the boycott is spreading: consumers are shunning SMS messaging in protest at the perceived complicity with the regime by the state telecoms company, TCI. Iran’s state-run broadcaster has been hit by a collapse in advertising as companies fear being blacklisted in a Facebook petition. There is also anecdotal evidence that people are moving money out of state banks and into private banks.
I was interviewed by Sarah Arnold in US magazine The Nation for an article published online on December 23:
According to a Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) report released December 4, of the 125 media workers in prison – a list that includes Ibrahim Jassam, a photographer held in US custody in Iraq – more of them published online than in any other medium.
The majority of online journalists behind bars come from China, the most high-profile of the many countries where Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have been accused of complicity with human rights violations. CPJ cites the Global Network Initiative as one effort to address this. Developed by these companies in cooperation with investors, academics and human rights organizations, the initiative details a set of principles aimed at protecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy. It’s difficult to tell whether the voluntary program will rein in the actions of the corporations.
“They’ve been named and shamed before, and their behavior has not really changed,” said Antony Loewenstein, author of The Blogging Revolution. Participants are asked to assess their impact in new markets and to maintain transparency, but they are not required to break local laws or pull out of offending countries.
Meanwhile, Loewenstein stressed his faith in the motives of, if not Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, then the human rights groups involved. “I’m skeptical only because I’ve seen these companies operating in China, and it’s really ugly,” he said. “I’m happy to be proven wrong.”
Yahoo threw down the gauntlet to bitter rivals Google and Microsoft yesterday by cutting the length of time that it retains information about what its users are doing online.
It will now keep information about online searches for only 90 days – down from 13 months – before ‘anonymising’ the data by getting rid of any information about the computer address of the user.
Democracy Now! is the world’s finest independent news service, based in New York and known for its fearless investigations of the major issues of the day (and many ignored by the corporate media.)
I was interviewed live on their TV/radio program in the studio this morning about my book, The Blogging Revolution:
JUAN GONZALEZ: A new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists says more internet journalists are jailed today than journalists in any other medium. At least fifty-six online journalists are jailed worldwide, according to CPJ’s census, a tally that surpasses the number of print journalists for the first time. The number of imprisoned online journalists has steadily increased since CPJ recorded the first jailed internet writer in its 1997 census.
AMY GOODMAN: Our next guest traveled to Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China in 2007 to look at bloggers around the world. He is Antony Loewenstein. He wrote The Blogging Revolution.
Welcome. Talk about blogging in these countries, why people are ending up in jail.
ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: The bottom line is that many, many people in these countries, of course, can’t rely on state-run media, which is propaganda. Bloggers and blogging is a way of trying to express different views. So in every country I went to, except for Cuba, where the internet is very underdeveloped, you have situations, people blogging about sex, about drugs, about gender issues, about politics. The majority of people in these countries don’t blog politically. They blog about their personal lives, about their boyfriends, their girlfriends. But there is increasingly, as that report states, many, many regimes who are fearful of the fact that you have independent voices, simply put.
In China, for example, I think it said there were thirty-five people who were imprisoned, many of those people—some of those people, I should add, with the assistance of Western multinationals like Yahoo!, who have actually given information to the regime to assist these people being put in jail. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Cisco, other security firms, internet firms, have sadly and shamefully been involved in these kind of complicity acts. And [inaudible] one of the things I discuss in the book is to actually have more transparency about how those guys actually operate in those kind of countries.
A place like Iran, say, the most part, the population is very, very young. So what you find is that despite like Ahmadinejad cracking down on dissent, which has undoubtedly happened in the last three years, you still find a very, very vibrant online community, far more vibrant than you get in most of the Western media. So there is, despite the crackdowns and despite the imprisonment, discussion about politics between reformists and liberals and, for that matter, conservatives. And one of the things that comes out, I think, very clearly is that many people in these countries resent how the Western media reports them, New York Times, those sort of papers.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Even in Iran, you noted that there’s an American company there, Secure Computing, that was providing a filter—
ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: I did.
JUAN GONZALEZ: —for Iran to be able to filter out information on the internet?
ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: The company denies it’s involved, so—but my understanding is that they actually are involved. This is what you find in country after country, that although Western multinationals often talk about human rights and democracy, we’ve seen in the last five years these companies actually operating to make a buck. China is, for example, the biggest internet market in the world, 250 million users, six million users going online every month. America’s got about 230 million people, roughly, online. So, surprise, surprise, they want to make a buck. And what you find increasingly is that companies like that are also moving into other nations.
And one of the things I discuss in the book is, we too much in the West think about these issues happening over there somewhere, China, Iran, somewhere, rather than happening here. And I think what we need to look at more closely is how these companies might operate when they behave in the West and, for that matter, are they exporting their oppression elsewhere, as well?
AMY GOODMAN: What about Saudi Arabia?
ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: Saudi Arabia made Iran seem liberal in comparison. The online community in Saudi Arabia is not massive, but certainly growing. I spent some time with some prominent bloggers there who are relatively liberal in a Saudi sense. And one of the challenges they have, that censorship actually in Saudi is quite minimal, believe it or not. There are websites that are blocked by the kingdom, but most of them actually are relatively available. What you find there is a great discussion between so-called liberal reformers who actually want to try and make the possibility of a liberal, more open Islam a possibility. And there’s often a great deal of competition online between more hardliners than conservatives who believe in a more fundamentalist interpretation of Islam and more individuals who believe in a more liberal, open, relatively democratic Islam.
AMY GOODMAN: Egypt?
ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: Egypt, again, arguably the most vibrant online community in the Middle East. There’s been a great deal of actually change there because of the internet, not least because of torture. Torture videos are increasingly now published on blogs. The government has been forced to respond. Torture still goes on, of course, but it’s becoming a lot less. And one of the things that strikes me is that a lot of social networking sites, Facebook, YouTube, actually are increasingly being used to organize dissent against the US-backed regime.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Antony Loewenstein, I want to thank you for being with us and writing this book.
ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: I know you head back to Australia tomorrow. The Blogging Revolution is the name of his book. He’ll be speaking at Blue Stockings in New York tonight.
My following talk was presented today to a full room at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre:
Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society
Luncheon Series, 25 November 2008
The Blogging Revolution: Going online in repressive regimes
Antony Loewenstein
Internet censorship is something that only happens in non-democratic states. Regimes that want to crush free speech routinely employ automated and human-directed methods to silence dissent and politically uncomfortable material. Jails are filled across the world with bloggers and dissidents who challenge authoritarian rule. These voices are rarely heard in our media, especially if they are critical of Western foreign policy dictates.
If only all this were true.
The Australian government, led by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, is currently proposing the imposition of a mandatory filtering process to “protect Australian families and kids from some material that is currently on the net”, namely child pornography and ultra-violent sites.
It may sound benign enough, but the country’s leading internet service providers, free speech lobbyists and independent parliamentarians have all responded with outrage that such a proposal might be implemented. Aside from the question of current technology being incapable of monitoring the long list of websites that could allegedly breach Australian law – around 10,000, according to the government – there is the freedom of speech angle.
A number of politicians have advocated blocking online gaming sites, general pornography sites, euthanasia sites and pro-anorexia sites. What next?
It is not hard to imagine a push to block sites that supposedly “support” terrorism. Take Hamas, the democratically elected party in Palestine and yet regarded as a terrorist group by much of the West. For many individuals around the world, myself included, Hamas is not a terrorist entity and should be engaged. But will over-zealous politicians make it illegal to view the organisation’s websites?
The militant Shia political group Hizbollah may find similar problems in years to come, as could Islamist organizations that challenge American foreign policy. These are political freedoms extinguished under the guise of protecting society from terrorism.
Despite these ominous possibilities, Australia is not one of the world’s worst internet freedom abusers. For my book, The Blogging Revolution, I travelled in 2007 to Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China to examine the role of the web in repressive states and the involvement of Western multinationals in assisting censorship. Most importantly, I wanted to challenge the thesis that the introduction of the web automatically brings Western-inspired, democratic ideals to a society. This is, of course, deluded fantasy and wishful thinking propagated by conservative think-tanks in the US.
I spoke in these nations with writers, bloggers, dissidents, politicians, citizens, men and women, activists, conservatives and liberals. How did they view their relationship with the ruling elite? How representative were their voices in the society and how possible was it for minorities to be heard? What was their attitude towards the Western powers, especially America?
In Egypt, for example, the country receives the second highest amount of US foreign aid annually after Israel – money that is predominantly spent on “security” to monitor and subdue the rising Muslim Brotherhood political insurgency – and many bloggers told me they resented this money being given to repress them.
President Hosni Mubarak is highly unpopular yet remains on the White House Christmas list. This is unlikely to change under President Barack Obama. Simply put, true democracy in the Middle East would likely see the election of Islamist parties in virtually every country, hostile to the US and Israel. For this reason alone, the maintenance of the status-quo – dictatorships that provide the West with stability and energy reserves – will continue. Blogger anger towards this Faustian bargain was palpable.
September 11 should have been the perfect opportunity for the Western media to hear the grievances of the Muslim world. With notable exceptions, indigenous voices were excluded then and still remain largely absent from the pages of the world’s leading papers. The underlying belief, rarely acknowledged but undoubtedly true, is that many Western editors only want to hear foreign news reported through a Western lens. Underlying racism? Yes. Unless a place or event is seen and heard by a Western reporter it isn’t legitimate and therefore unprovable. When was the last time we read regular reports from on-the-ground bloggers in war zones or difficult to reach areas, rather than the occasional dispatch from a visiting journalist? It happens all-too-infrequently.
The general consensus across the globe was that political and military meddling by Washington and London was making the job of real democrats much more difficult. Democracy was a term defined differently in every nation, but virtually nobody shunned the idea of more freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of the press.
As one blogger told me in Tehran: “Most of the people I know are in favour of reform, not revolution, because people are too tired to experience another revolution.” I found the same message echoed throughout the countries I visited: the desire to experience incremental change without foreign involvement.
I was reminded of a comment from leading Middle East journalist Robert Fisk who told Australian television in 2005:
“The Arab world…would love some of this shiny beautiful democracy which we possess and enjoy. They would love some of it. They would like some freedom. But many of them would like freedom from us – from our armies, from our influence. And that’s the problem, you see. What Arabs want is justice as much as democracy.”
And we don’t want to give it to them.
In every nation I visited, however, bloggers were starting to unpack issues that remained largely hidden from public view. Women in Egypt were campaigning against the tradition of female genital mutilation. Activists in Cuba were highlighting the repressive nature of the Castro regime and the counter-productive policies of the US administration towards them. Opposition figures in Damascus were blogging about state-imposed web filtering. Saudi Arabian women, blocked from driving or working in the US-backed dictatorship, were using the web to express a desire for greater human rights. Iranian hip-hops were distributing their banned beats via file sharing software. Chinese dissidents were protesting the role of Western multinationals, such as Google, Cisco, Yahoo and Microsoft, in the dubious role of assisting state censorship.
Blogging is not in itself revolutionary, but the act of self-expression online can be. Although the vast majority of bloggers in non-democratic nations are not dissecting politics – due to disinterest or fear of being caught – I was fascinated to hear why certain people courageously risked their scalps to challenge the iron-will of dictators. Like dissidents in the former Soviet Union – who only had limited resources and reached a fraction of the people bloggers can affect – online activists find the medium intoxicating because of its reach and global impact.
Many bloggers I met were conscious of a local and international audience. They wanted their own regime to feel pressure and change policies but also generate noise around the world. It was a realisation that outside influence can, if used judiciously and respectfully, be invaluable in supporting democratic movements in repressive regimes. For example, many bloggers in Saudi Arabia, desperate to convince their own citizens of the benefits of a moderate, political Islam, are using the web to slowly pressure the fundamentalist state to not fear democratic elections and a free press. It’s an uphill struggle, not helped by a Western world determined to keep the oil pumping.
Barely a week goes by when the media is not filled with stories of bloggers being imprisoned by unsavoury regimes. Take the Burmese blogger Nay Phone Latt, who recently received over 20 years for possession of a banned video and having a blog to express his concerns about the increasing difficulty of Burmese people in voicing their opinions since the massive protests in 2007. The regime, in a desperate move to stop images and news of abuse leaking to the world, regularly shuts down the entire web system for days on end, effectively cutting off the country from the outside world. This is only possible in places where the internet isn’t central to the running of an economy, like China. Instead, the powers in Beijing have instituted the Golden Shield to filter out unwanted material.
With the collusion of Western companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others in China’s Great Firewall, the role of these multinationals is largely ignored in the Western media. In my book I examine the various excuses, justifications and defences offered by them when explaining their actions in the quasi-Communist state. The real reason is clearly the fact that there around now over 250 million web users and growing at six million every month. Such potential profits make ethical considerations seem quaint in boardrooms across the world.
However, the recent launch of the Global Network Initiative – a code of conduct for corporations on privacy and free speech created by a coalition of human rights groups, media development, research organizations, internet and communications companies such as Google to ensure that companies acknowledge their “responsibility to respect and protect the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users” – will be a test of necessary transparency. It is no longer acceptable for web companies to claim they are merely complying with laws in a particular country. International laws and norms must be applied, with the pressure from the US Congress, if necessary.
Recently in Melbourne, Australia, a number of individuals gathered to consider a proposal to design an ethical labelling system for media distribution. Ellie Rennie, research fellow at Melbourne’s Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research, said the following:
“If you think of Fair Trade coffee for example, we know that behind Fair Trade coffee there’s a very elaborate and trustworthy system of workers’ rights, of ethical farming. So this is similar, in that we need the label on that media in order to determine what kind of media we might be using in the same way that we buy Fair Trade coffee, because we believe in what it stands for.”
Could such standards be applied to web companies operating in authoritarian regimes? While we all rely on Google and related companies, how often do we consider their actions in non-Western nations? And as importantly, is the knowledge they are gaining in such lands likely to be implemented against us some time in the near future?
Aside from the issue of oppressive censorship, my work acknowledges that blogging culture cannot be seen to represent societies as a whole. In the main, they are middle class men and women with access to information and technology far above the average citizen.
One of the dangers with my kind of work is the presumption that repression only occurs in authoritarian states. Increasingly, Western governments are attempting to monitor and filter information on the internet. Politicians in Britain recently announced plans to give security agencies and police unprecedented and legally binding powers to ban the media from reporting matters of national security.
In Argentina since 2006 over 100 people have successfully secured temporary restraining orders that direct Google and Yahoo Argentina to erase the results of search queries. Judges, public officials, models, actors and world-cup soccer star and national team head coach Diego Maradona have used the law to silence criticism.
US Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman this year successfully pressured YouTube owners Google to remove videos from “Islamist terrorist organizations”.
A recent article in the Economist magazine attempted to explain the fall of independent blogging. The medium, the magazine stated, “has entered the mainstream, which—as with every new medium in history—looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death”:
“Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers.”
Alas, this thesis may be partly true in the West but utterly inaccurate for the rest of the world. Heralding the death of blogging is both premature and ignores the vast importance of online media in developing nations.
US writer Clay Shirky explains in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising Without Organisations that “communications tools (such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blogging) don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring”. In other words, it’s only now becoming possible to see and hear online the words of indigenous communities in Bolivia, dispossessed voters in Kenya or sex workers in India.
Letting people speak and write for themselves without a Western lens is one of the triumphs of blogging. Its culture is unlike that of any previous social movement. Disjointed and disorganised, its aims are proudly vague. While many want the right to be critical of the media and political dysfunction, others simply crave the ability to date and listen to subversive music. That in itself is revolutionary for much of the world.
The following feature, by Pam Walker, appeared in the Hub newspaper on October 13:
Few would now deny the growing power of the internet and its appeal to younger readers who are turning their backs on mainstream media in favour of online content, especially blogs.
Antony Loewenstein, Australian journalist and author of My Israel Question, has just launched his latest book The Blogging Revolution, a revealing account of bloggers around the globe who write under repressive regimes.
Loewenstein decided to check out how these bloggers fared, gathering his material at private parties in Iran and Egypt, internet cafes in Saudi Arabia and Damascus, the homes of Cuban dissidents and newspaper offices in Beijing.
Here he discovered how the internet is threatening the rule of governments and how bloggers are leading the charge for change.
“It was an amazing trip. In every country I visited, except Cuba, the online community is vibrant,” Loewenstein said. “Most countries saw the internet as economic development. It was not seen as a political threat but over the last year governments have noticed and a trend of censoring and blocking websites has emerged.”
He acknowledges his book is critical of the west.
“I wrote it because I sensed in much of the western media a tendency to grossly oversimplify things, to push an unquestioning official line and to see everything through the prism of terrorism. I thought the best thing was to go to these countries and check it out for myself.”
What he found surprised him.
“There was more debate, both online and off, than I had expected, even in places like Iran,” he said. “Iran is amazingly liberal online, and there’s a lot of criticism of Ahmadinajad. Despite censorship and control there are debates going on, some liberal, some conservative, that are more robust than what you get in the west. But yes, there are many blocked sites deemed pornographic or political.
“Saudi Arabia is arguably the most oppressive country in the world but surprisingly, the web is generally unfiltered. There are lines that can’t be crossed but a growing number of Saudi women are going online which is incredibly empowering – one woman has a blog talking about enjoying buying lingerie for her partner.”
And China, which tops the world in internet usage with 250 million people online (the US is next with 230 million) has been opening up in the last five years.
“You find people discussing corruption online. In the cities and in rural areas you find campaigns and public protests against local officials,” he said. “Bloggers have started public online protests which the regime has allowed.”
Loewenstein says the strength of blogs is it allows people to be engaged politically.
“Do blogs change elections? No. Do they have input and influence on what is discussed? Yes,” he said. “Elections are so stage managed. Both political parties have ‘embedded’ journalists so citizen journalists who can write about what they are seeing can be helpful, despite the idea that if a mainstream journo doesn’t write it, it isn’t true.”
And Loewenstein says Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have all been willing to censor their search engines, and Yahoo and Microsoft have even handed over information about users who have then been jailed.
“Look at how some of these companies have operated, how they’ve excused it, posting photos of wanted Tibetans on the yahoo.china homepage. Yahoo US said it had nothing to do with that, so where does responsibility lie?”
In the US and the EU there are now moves to implement some agreement regarding companies like Google to specify that if they operate in countries with authoritarian regimes they don’t have to abide by local laws.
So has the internet advanced the march of democracy?
“Yes and no. The problem is you can monitor what people say online so it makes Big Brother more effective but it also challenges authoritarian regimes and gives people more of a direct voice.”
The following news story and interview, by Rob Bates (photo by Alan Place), appears in this week’s Wentworth Courier newspaper:
Controversial author, journalist and blogger Antony Loewenstein will host an event at Paddington’s Fringe Bar to discuss internet censorship and the brave few who rise against it.
Loewenstein’s first book, My Israel Question, received mixed reviews ranging from glowing praise to death threats as it offered a critical Jewish perspective on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“There’s a lot of fear in the Jewish community about Israel not being seen as the ideal state and so I was accused of being an anti-Semite, a self-hating Jew and even a Nazi,” he said.
“This hasn’t intimidated me, which was clearly the intention, but inspired me because I know many people want free and open debate on Israel’s behaviour without fear of being labelled.”
For his latest book, The Blogging Revolution, Loewenstein trekked through Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Cuba and China talking to dissidents who risked their lives to speak out against oppressive regimes.
As well as telling their frightening and courageous stories, the book assesses the role of major western companies like Microsoft and Google in facilitating internet censorship and persecution.
“These companies do exactly what they’re told and even pre-empt the censorship by blocking things before they’ve been asked to,” he said.
“In the last five years, Yahoo China has handed over information about a number of Chinese dissidents using Gmail, resulting in lengthy prison sentences or worse.”
Admitting that companies working in these countries were “over a barrel”, Loewenstein said more could be done to “push back”. “The head of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, recently went to China to meet with senior censorship officials and discuss how they could move toward change,” he said.
“He might fail, he may not change anything but I applaud him for starting the dialogue.”
Loewenstein said it was critical for Australians to be aware of the push for tighter censorship in our own country and demand a greater diversity of voices in our media.
“I’m not saying that blogging is about to replace mainstream media but I definitely think it will have a greater role in the shifting structure,” he said.
“More and more I think people are craving independent, alternative information and are frustrated that they’re not getting it from mainstream media.”
My following article is published in this week’s Time Out Sydney magazine:
In the years after September 11, 2001, I was constantly frustrated by the failure of the Western media to examine the real reasons behind the attacks. It was as if only a Western journalist’s filter was allowed to see the post 9/11 world. From the hills of Afghanistan to the deserts of Iraq, I constantly waited to read indigenous voices from these conflict zones. They rarely came.
The internet has revolutionised the ways in which the world communicates, does business and dissents. In Western societies, such advances are irreversible but what about the rest of the planet? In 2007 I visited Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China to examine how the net was challenging authoritarian regimes, the role of Western multinationals such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in the assistance of web filtering and how misinformed we are in the West towards states considered “enemies” or “allies”.
I spoke to writers, journalists, politicians, dissidents and citizens to gauge attitudes towards social and political issues in their countries and what they really thought about taboo subjects. Blogs, websites and online forums prove that state-run media are usually little more than propaganda-producing outlets. In many places, therefore, online media is the only space to find quality and reliable information.
Across the world, young generations are challenging tired state media by writing online about politics, sex, drugs, relationships, religion, popular culture and Brad Pitt. From female Egyptian activists opposed to female circumcision to outspoken, pro-Western women in Cuba, people are being empowered by new technology to create spaces away from the prying eyes of meddling authorities.
My book, The Blogging Revolution, is more conversation than definitive statement. As Western media struggles to adapt to a web future – ironically enough, sales of print media are rising in many non-Western states – it is vital to examine the shifting relationship between reader and writer and journalist and consumer.
In the non-Western world, however, as I extensively examine in the book, expectations towards transparency and democracy are different and necessarily so. Blogs are one way to gain insights into these worlds, away from our current obsession with “terrorism.”
The following review of The Blogging Revolution is published by the Committee to Protect Bloggers:
I told Antony Loewenstein well over a month ago that I would review his book, “The Blogging Revolution.” I’ve put it off not because the book’s no good but because I simply hate reviewing books. It takes forever and, if you’re a freelancer, pays crap. I’ve found various ways of getting around it before, primarily by rambling on without end, as with this review of “Muslims in Spain” on my personal blog.
This time, however, I’m going to try an ongoing review. That is, I am going to expand the review as I go through the book. Each time I write, I will be registering my impressions. Some of those impressions will be qualified, even contradicted, by further reading. Others will not. Not ideal, perhaps, though in keeping with the spirit of blogging, I think. Hopefully, the discussion in the comments will also be extended due to the form. Plus, both Antony as the writer and you as readers will actually get a review out of the deal.
A couple of introductory comments. As far as I know it is the first book on the topic of repression of bloggers. That alone would make it an important book. It’s also got a very cool cover. Antony I met long before he even had the idea for this book and was interested to watch the idea, and then the reality, develop. To know more about Antony, who is an Australian writer and journalist, check out his blog, Antony Loewenstein.
I have to confess straight out to a certain trepidation about the book. Antony’s first is the controversial “My Israel Question,” which I think could be described as a book by a Jewish anti-Zionist. The gravity that things like this book can sometimes produce however, attracts, in addition to critical thinkers, those with a rather problematic relationship to Jews. I’m talking less about anti-Semites than about disengenous anti-Israelis whose racism is couched in an objection to racism, much as some European politicians condone intolerance out of a worshipful relationship to tolerance.
I’m telling you this not to slap Antony upside the head, but so that you can tack your own sails against the direction of my wind if you feel it necessary.
OK, back to the book in question. To write it Antony researched a great deal. He was a blogger to begin with so already had a relationship with the technology, the communication strategy and some of the players. To write it, he visited Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China. This is also, chapterwise, how he organized the book.
Introduction.
The thing that irritates me about the introduction, something which I have already seen in everything from blog posts to radio reports on the “progressive” side of the spectrum, is this notion that repression of bloggers in countries like Cuba has the following qualities.
That the U.S. has an effect on the world is beyond question, but one thing I never see is an expose on how the vast power of the country is responsible for, say, South African music, or love. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If the U.S. is responsible for everything, then it’s responsible for everything. And that includes French cinema and dim sum.
To the second and third points, I’m sure there are some people who believe that because Iran’s governing cadre is mostly creepy tyrants, for example, so are its people. But I don’t think there are many. It does make sense to ask the question, however, how much do the people in a given country believe in the philosophy of information their governments express? I think it’s vital to any exploration of repression.
Now, one of the main focii in the introduction is on the role of Western (really, American) companies in providing both the technology of repression as well as the strategy for it. From Google to Microsoft, Cisco to Smart Computing to Facebook, American Internet and social media companies have enthusiastically and repeatedly effected the repression of citizens in other countries and their own. What pisses me off about this even more than normal is that the ideal of America, the ideal whose practice made these innovative companies possible, has been whored off so enthusiastically by these companies NOT to make a fortune, but to make a little bit more money to add to the already-existing fortunes. For the life of me I have never understood this. Wouldn’t the PR benefit of acting decently more than make up for the loss of possible future customers in places like China.
Antony is right to point out that this is an integral element in the repression of bloggers and other practioners of social media. I look forward to more coverage of this as the book goes on. (With Tom Lantos having died, I doubt seriously there is another American politician with the moral uprightness and love of conflict who will hold these companies to task.)
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 is published today by the Melbourne Age:
During the bruising Democratic Party tussle with Hillary Clinton in April, a citizen journalist recorded Obama saying that he understood why working-class voters in decrepit industrial towns were “bitter” and clung to “guns or religion”.
Despite being a paid-up Obama supporter, writer Mayhill Fowler worked for the Huffington Post’s Off The Bus program – around 1,800 unpaid researchers, interviewers and reporters follow the intricacies of the campaign and publish it online – and believed it was her duty to reveal the event.
It was a defining media moment, made even more significant because most of the mainstream press explaining Obama’s comments conveniently airbrushed Fowler’s work. A “real” journalist hadn’t recorded the comment and therefore could be ignored.
It was the kind of exclusionary attitude all-too-common in Western media offices. Editors tell themselves that only “professionals” should be allowed to contribute published or broadcast information to the daily news cycle. Thankfully, this broken narrative is disappearing before our eyes. Alternative models are appearing by necessity.
Participatory media could easily be adopted in Australia. What about leading media outlets utilising trusted and vetted citizens in marginal seats and giving them resources to write and investigate issues relevant to their communities? From corrupt councillors to government inaction, politicians will find it hard to ignore questions from voters in their own electorate.
Journalism skills are hardly rocket science and can be acquired with experience and a little training. These so-called amateurs could blog, maintain wikis, write articles and develop contacts that would exceed any professional reporter who simply can’t devote the time to one area.
Networked journalism both engages a wider slice of society and ensures that more segments of the debate, from conservative to the progressive end, won’t feel so unrepresented in the media.
The future of robust journalism is still being written but it certainly won’t emerge from ignoring the wishes of the masses. Off The Bus co-founder Jay Rosen defines citizen journalism thus: “When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another.”
The current debate in the West over the dwindling resources of the mainstream media remains mired in tired paradigms. Both print and online can survive, but the relationship between the professionals and their readers has to change. Print circulation is falling across the Western world and is unlikely to shift soon. Journalists have never been so mistrusted. Media owners, with notable exceptions, are not investing in investigative work.
The only answer is to connect interested parties from a diverse cross-selection and allow them access to the tools of the media elite. I agree with American media commentator Jeff Jarvis who tells newspapers: “Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.” In other words, know your strengths and don’t waste valuable resources sending journalists on stories that can be adequately covered by a few reporters. Readers will always be instinctively drawn to the best coverage (not sloppily re-written wire copy.)
Of course, these discussions are largely irrelevant in the non-Western world, the vast majority of the planet. Newspapers and television stations in authoritarian regimes are usually little more than propaganda-producing outlets (though interestingly in many of these states circulation figures are rising.) The internet is often the only source of alternative and reliable information.
During the research for my new book, I spent time in Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China to discuss with writers, dissidents, online gurus, citizens, bloggers and politicians the ways in which the net is challenging repressive regimes and forcing uncomfortable issues into public consciousness.
Torture, multi-party elections, an unfiltered internet, gender relations and female circumcision are just a small taste of what courageous bloggers and activists are discussing online. Even with the censorship of many websites, through the assistance of Western multinationals such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, dissent is growing in many of these nations. But are we listening to their voices?
We are only given a tiny glimpse of these worlds in the West. I remember speaking to many middle-class Chinese twenty-somethings who resented the ways in which Western journalists stereotyped their nationalism as dangerous and foreign. As many angry bloggers told me, is it really any different to Americans celebrating and defending their government in times of crisis?
The Beijing Games proved that an anti-China narrative was alive and well in the foreign pages of our media. If reporters thought of reading Chinese bloggers writing during the event, they would have found a multitude of opinions about human rights, Tibet, the Dalai Lama and Taiwan. I waited optimistically for the publishing of these blogger’s perspectives, but it seemed that only a Western journalist’s filter was allowed to judge proceedings.
The West and the rest may seem eons apart in terms of interests and desires, but everybody craves trustworthy news and views. It’s time to engage communities to find ways in which they can contribute making sense of a rapidly shrinking globe.
Antony Loewenstein is the author of The Blogging Revolution, published by Melbourne University Press.
Sunday Night Safran is a great weekly show on ABC youth radio Triple J.
I was interviewed last night about The Blogging Revolution, the role of Western multinationals in repressive regimes and how the American relationship to the internet should be viewed in the non-Western world.
The Fourth Estate is a great weekly radio program on one of Sydney’s finest independent radio stations, 2ser.
In a wide-ranging interview, host Daz Chandler and I talked about the role of Western multinationals in authoritarian regimes, the seeming lack of understanding of online privacy in the West and the issues in The Blogging Revolution.
My latest column for New Matilda is about the ways in which the web can challenge dictatorships around the globe and the complicity of Western firms in assisting repression:
With the Beijing Olympics now a distant memory — and commentators wondering whether the event will herald greater openness in the Communist nation — local internet users are already reporting increased online censorship. As lawyer and legal blogger Liu Xiaoyuan recounted last week:
“Yesterday, I was interviewed by some foreign media; they wanted me to talk about issues of press freedom and freedom of speech during the Olympics. During the Olympics, authorities stopped blocking foreign media websites, and we were free to browse them, this is definitely a big step forward. But, controls on internet speech are tighter than they were before, and many things cannot be talked about; even posts like this one will be deleted. What I didn’t expect is that now that the Olympics are over, internet speech still hasn’t [been] let go.”
There has also been extensive online chatter about China’s medal haul in Beijing and the inevitable comparison with the US, including a pithy challenge to America’s obesity culture. Despite China now having the world’s largest online community — 250 million and growing at around six million new users per month — the Communist Party has started to recognise the potential health dangers of new technology (and not just the increased weight of users): late last week a leading Chinese legislator announced that about four million Chinese youngsters were addicted to the internet, attracted by “unhealthy” online games.
Meanwhile, the recent war between Georgia and Russia — in many ways a proxy battle between the Russia and the West — proved the effectiveness of bloggers in deconstructing the realities behind the headlines. Russian bloggers regularly use LiveJournal, a social networking blogging tool, and during the conflict we were treated to a relatively unfiltered perspective, radically different to the pro-Kremlin line in the Russian state media.
All sides issued exaggerated propaganda, but some Russians, despite the vast majority of the country supporting President Dimitri Medvedev’s offensive, were more considered. Journalist Michael Idov wrote, “Russia is a society of conspiracy theorists. In fact, the notion that politics is mere theatre and policy is determined via backroom collusion is so central to the Russian worldview that ‘theorist’ is perhaps too weak a word. Russia is a society of conspiracy axiomists.” Georgian bloggers were desperate to be heard, too.
In Turkey, over 450 websites recently joined in solidarity to protest the state’s increasing censorship of mainstream sites, such as YouTube (again available after being temporarily banned for allegedly insulting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern Turkish state).
A public prosecution’s office in Egypt announced in late August () that a blogger held in Cairo’s Tora prison for a month should be released immediately. Police accused the blogger, 21-year-old mass communications student Mohamed Refaat Bayyoumy, of being a member of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, and charged him with possession of literature promoting the organisation. In a separate case, a blogger imprisoned for four years for allegedly insulting the prophet Mohammed and President Hosni Mubarak is facing increased harassment.
There is no co-ordinated worldwide campaign against web filtering and oppression but bloggers and activists in various countries are starting to realise the power of organising locally and globally.
The proliferation of blogs giving air to indigenous voices in countries deemed “enemies” or “allies” is a challenge to the Western-centric media attitudes we are familiar with. As I argue in my new book, it is essential to hear alternative voices from a place such as Iran, where the latest reports suggest that a US military strike is imminent. During my visit to Iran last year, there was constant fear of an aggressive move by Washington or Israel.
What most dissidents, bloggers and journalists couldn’t understand — and these were people who mostly opposed the regime — was how the political planners expected a bombing run to lessen the control of the state. If anything, it would only increase it. And as I argued on the Lowy Institute blog last week, the current Western posturing is actually more about protecting the Jewish state’s supremacy than worrying about Iran’s supposed nuclear capabilities.
While the challenges new media presents for old media may be a key issue in the Western media context, in the vast majority of other countries, the presence of a technology which can express ideas usually kept between friends and family is an inherently liberating force. Ultimately, in much of the non-Western world, the blogosphere is the only source of reliable information, as state run media is guaranteed to be shameless propaganda.
In surveying the activities of bloggers and online activists, however, it’s essential to note the largely silent influence of Western multinationals. The role of companies such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Adidas, Coke and McDonald’s, among many others, has been to complicity assist some of the worst authoritarian regimes on the planet, such as China’s. Internet firms, many of whom we rely on every day for our information needs, are actively involved in the restriction of freedom for others in non-democratic nations.
Days before the start of the Beijing Olympics, Canadian writer Naomi Klein argued that “Police State 2.0″ was being born:
“The games have been billed as China’s ‘coming out party’ to the world. They are far more significant than that. These Olympics are the coming out party for a disturbingly efficient way of organising society, one that China has perfected over the past three decades, and is finally ready to show off. It is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarianism communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism. Some call it ‘authoritarian capitalism’, others ‘market Stalinism’ — personally I prefer ‘McCommunism’.”
It isn’t hard to imagine a dystopian future in which the skills learned by Western firms in a place like China may be transported back to our own societies, or simply used in other countries desperate to control the online flow of information.
I was interviewed on ABC Radio National’s Media Report today on The Blogging Revolution and the ways in which the internet is far more complex than simply being a supposedly democratising force:
Antony Funnell: What do Iran, Cuba and Egypt all have in common? Well, they all have governments which suppress dissent and they all have bloggers, people using the social power of the internet to communicate with their own and the outside world.
Now the popular Western perception of the blogger in a country with a repressive regime is of a person trying quietly to bring about change, using the power of modern technology to bring about a liberal, or at least democratic, transformation.
Well that’s one story. But as journalist and author Antony Loewenstein discovered, there are many more. His new book is called ‘The Blogging Revolution’ and it’s a collection of his experiences in six countries, the three I’ve just mentioned, as well as Saudi Arabia, Syria and China.
Now Lowenstein challenges us to take a more realistic and complex view of the power and value of blogging.
Antony Loewenstein: We perceive in the West mistakenly, that many Chinese people are craving some kind of open democratic system. Now there’s no doubt that many people in China want some kind of democracy and would like maybe greater freedom of speech. But the simple fact is that study after study after study proves, or suggests at least, that the majority of Chinese people are happy with their lives, are happy with the one-party state, they’re happy with the fact of their current direction in life. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t issues, and there are, and the web of course in China, one of the great things it’s done, is allowed people to actually articulate issues that were previously unheard of, such as, say, corruption. So for example in the last sort of few years, there have been thousands upon thousands of protests in small towns across China, about corruption.
Now this is not challenging the one-party state and the government itself, the regime in Beijing generally speaking tolerates that as we saw after the earthquake in Sichuan as well, where there were public protests against builders who allegedly were involved in building constructions that collapsed after the earthquake. So it’s a far more nuanced picture than much of our media allows, and I guess that’s even often frustrated me. Which led me to write the book, in a way, was how narrow these interpretations of so-called enemies or allies of the West are in so much of our media, and it’s far easier for Western journalists to go to country X and simply report everything through his or her filter. Now I’m a Western journalist too of course, but it was very important for me to actually allow these people in these countries to actually have a voice and be heard themselves, rather than always filtered through my own perceptions and biases.
Antony Funnell: Now you travelled to six countries for your book, and as you’ve said, you’ve found encouraging signs as well as the bad and the frustrating things about the way in which the internet is used, the way blogging occurs in those countries, or doesn’t occur in those countries. But it seems to me from reading the book that your experiences in Cuba were very different from your experiences elsewhere. Tell us about Cuba.
Antony Loewenstein: Cuba, of all the places I went to, Cuba’s internet is the least developed, and the reasons for that really are twofold: firstly the US embargo, which has been going on since the early ’60s is insanely criminal and if nothing else actually restricts much material and infrastructure to actually arrive in Cuba. The other reason of course is the fact that the Castro regime, (although now Raoul has allegedly taken over and Fidel’s kind of in the background just penning his diatribes every few days) they have a profound fear of dissent. And so I’m someone who very much defends some elements of what’s going on in Cuba, but the simple fact is that it is a one-party state, it doesn’t allow freedom of speech association or freedom of the press. And the internet of course is seen like in many other countries, as a threat to that. The internet does exist, and some people do blog, and generally speaking it’s a fairly privileged middle-class, who are able to access that.
Antony Funnell: There’s only a small percentage of population though that have internet access.
Antony Loewenstein: A few percent, indeed, and it’s basically one of the lowest figures. In fact it is the lowest figure in Latin America as a whole. So I think it’s a different mentality. In Egypt, for example, years ago, the Mubarak regime realised the internet was going to be great to build the economy of the country. It wasn’t seen initially as a threat to its rule, and Iran was the same. So they actually through massive government support, allow the internet to exist in even the poorest communities, as a way to try and build economic development. What of course they realised very soon, as we see in Iran and elsewhere around the world, is the fact that now there are dissidents and activists who are challenging a one-party state. Cuba I think has also realised that, and its policy was the opposite. They would cut off at the knees from the beginning. Inevitably of course, if a country wants to develop these days, it’s impossible to avoid the web itself, and that’s what’s happening in Cuba. There is a shift and the web is becoming more known. I mean I found it surreal to meet a number of students in Havana who were learning Information Technology and the internet, but actually weren’t allowed to access the internet, if that make sense. So therefore they could access the ‘intranet’ and you meet many people in Cuba who are allowed to access an ‘intranet’, which is really only a number of websites that were approved by the regime itself.
Antony Funnell: It’s not a real internet.
Antony Loewenstein: Indeed, it’s basically websites there which are approved by the authorities, and clearly they’re going to be very limited in nature. So I think it’s a different policy I suppose. I think also the perceived threat, and the real threat from the US in Cuba, gave justification of the regime to block any kind of outside influences, and the internet was one of those things. That is starting to change, and we might, might see a difference with a new President in the US towards the policies with Cuba. But I think what’s important to know is that most countries around the world, the internet initially was not seen as a threat, it was not seen as a threat. Now it’s regarded as that because you have countless numbers of bloggers and writers, even though they’re a minority, actually writing and dissenting and actually challenging one party rule.
Antony Funnell: Now you make the point, as you did earlier, that blogging and the internet is a great democratiser, and that’s a point that’s been made by many people before. But is that really valid in the sense that it seems even from your book, that most people you encountered who blogged, were middle-class; we’re not talking about a broad scope of society. In all of these countries it seems to be the middle-class who are undertaking this activity.
Antony Loewenstein: There’s an element of truth in that. As I talk about in my book, there’s no doubt that in many countries the people who have the greatest access to this technology, are people of course who have some kind of a greater income.
Antony Funnell: And literacy as well, I would say.
Antony Loewenstein: And literacy, undoubtedly so. But of course what you do see in many countries, and this includes China, for example. Now China has 1.3-billion people, and about 250-million of those are online now, which means that the majority are not. But what you do find is in the last few years, that many of the greatest increasing penetration of the web in China actually are in rural areas. People who are generally not literate enough to use the web granted, but not people who are necessarily in the cities. So there is a sense that for example, there’s many farming communities in China, which are using the web in terms of getting access to greater markets throughout their country. Now this sort of stuff is not known that much in the West, but it exists, and it’s not a tiny minority, it’s a growing number of people who are using the web for those purposes.
These people in China aren’t using it to challenge the government necessarily, but what they are doing is often to challenge corruption or challenge shoddy building, as we saw with the recent earthquake. So – and in Saudi Arabia again, there was a sense very much that the people, 20% of the population use the web, it’s the minority, true, but it’s growing, very, very quickly. And I think there’s also a belief with many activists in these countries (and this is what I talk about in my book too) to actually try and involve people who don’t have as easy access to the web, in other words a belief that Yes, we don’t want a situation where the web in itself is a supposed democratiser, but are we only actually hearing middle-class voices? Why aren’t we hearing voices for example of, as I talk about, sex workers in India, or people who actually are often disenfranchised within their own society. The web in itself gives them a voice, and I think many people in my book who I talk to, were aware of the fact that they don’t want to come across as being part of the elite, although in some ways they are, but it’s important for them to acknowledge the fact that Let’s get other people engaged who are less privileged than they are.
Antony Funnell: Sure, look I take on what you’re saying there, but I mean, given that we are talking predominantly about one section of society’s engaging in this internet activity, how good a gauge is it of the mood of a country?
Antony Loewenstein: I think it’s one good gauge. Is it the only gauge? No, it’s not. But I think there is a sense in every country that I went to, the internet in itself, not just the middle-class, actually has changed things. Now my point is not simply to say that the web by definition democratises, therefore makes the country more open, therefore makes it more Western-friendly; it’s far from the case at all, as you know, having read the book. And I think one of the key things in a country like Iran, say, is that many people I met, many of whom support Ahmadinejad I might add, and support the idea of Islamism and the idea of a kind of quite hardline religious state, their idea about what Iran should be is ,even the reformists, and I spent time with the former Vice President of the country, Mohammad Aliabadi, who is a reformist, and supposedly a liberal. When you hear him speak though, his views about Iran and the world are still very hardline. He believes in Islamism and he believes in shunning Israel, he believes very much in the idea of a religious state.
Now these people are part of the elite, that’s true, but what you find in Iran also as a good example, is that the majority of the population supposedly, according to many studies, away from the internet I might add, want an Islamic state. In other words, the idea that the web in itself and activists in Iran are moving towards some kind of greater liberal state is simply not borne out by the facts. So yes, you’re right to the extent to say that it’s one gauge, and it’s an important gauge, and also I think in countries like that, it’s very hard to gauge how people think. There’s not regular polling as we have in the West about certain issues and ideas, so the web is one way, only one way, to gauge how people actually view both their own countries and the world.
Antony Funnell: And look, just finally, it seems to me that one of the other things that you challenge is the idea that oppressive regimes are good at closing down this type of freedom of speech, if you like, on the web. We have a notion in the West I guess, that regimes in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Iran, that they must be very good because we know in the past they’ve been very good at putting down dissent. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with the internet, they don’t seem to be all that sophisticated in the approach they take to filtering, say.
Antony Loewenstein: Well it’s incredibly random, I mean to the point where there are thousands upon thousands of key words that often are blocked, in places like China and Iran. And of course one of the things that it’s also important to remember is that in countries like China, companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are actively involved in actually assisting the regime in censorship programs. So whereas in the West we view those companies as kind of these benevolent forces that help us find information, the fact is China has become like a laboratory for Western internet companies and security firms to improve and work on their security infrastructure so to speak, which can then be exported back to the West or other authoritarian states. So the filtering process in a place like China is sophisticated to the point where a lot of websites are blocked. People can always find a way around it, and I suppose one of the things that amazed me in the writing of the book was that regimes in some ways are fighting a battle they can never win. You can block websites, you can put people in jail, you can do all that kind of thing, as they are doing in every country I went to, but ultimately, as clichéd as it might sound, people’s freedom will actually speak out in the end, despite all the restrictions that may happen. And I think what’s happening increasingly is that many people in the West are realising that to support individuals in countries like this who have got something to say, who may well be, I might add, critical of the West, I mean many people in Saudi Arabia are hardline Islamists who are critical of the regime and critical of the US. And to me it seems a shame that many Western human rights organisations often feel uncomfortable I think, supporting Islamists, particularly in the post 9/11 world, because they’re seen as being critical of the West, and to me, if we believe in human rights, it should be human rights for all.
Antony Funnell: Well the book is called ‘The Blogging Revolution’ and the author is Antony Loewenstein. Antony, thank you very much for joining us on The Media Report.
Antony Loewenstein: Thanks so much for having me.
Antony Funnell: And Antony’s book is published by Melbourne University Press.
My following essay appears in today’s Weekend Australian newspaper:
The young online tribe is more interested in discussing sex, drugs and rock’n'roll than political revolution, writes Antony Loewenstein
Early last month, some Iranian members of parliament voted to debate a draft bill that aimed to “toughen punishment for disturbing mental security in society” by adding to the list of offences punishable by execution crimes such as “establishing websites and weblogs promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy”.
Nikahang, a Canadian-based Iranian online cartoonist and blogger, was defiant: “Only people who disturb people’s mental security could support such a thing.”
During a visit to the Islamic Republic in 2007 to research the blogging community, I found this attitude was common. With a population of 70million, most of them under 30, Iran is home to one of the Middle East’s largest online communities, which is thriving despite onerous censorship and risk of imprisonment.
The more than 100,000 active Iranian bloggers, writing mainly in Farsi, include hardline Islamists battling with reformists over religious dress, anti-Semitism, the war in Iraq and dating rituals.
The rise of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it seems, has only emboldened activists of all political persuasions.
I spent a day with the country’s former vice-president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a regular blogger. This chubby man, a frequent giggler, chastised me when I asked why it was impossible to criticise Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei publicly, just as Westerners routinely slam elected politicians. “One of the misunderstandings is that you try and compare the institutions of countries, which are not similar to each other,” he instructed.
I quickly discovered that in a country such as Iran, the divide between conservative and moderate is far narrower than generally presumed. Iranian reformers are Islamists in less fundamentalist garb and most citizens appear to want an Islamic nation with a modern face.
Across the world, young generations are challenging tired state media by writing online about politics, sex, drugs, relationships, religion, popular culture and especially Angelina Jolie. From Egyptian activists opposed to female circumcision to outspoken, pro-Western women in Cuba, people are being empowered by new technology to create spaces away from the prying eyes of meddling authorities.
The rise of the online community means the relationship between the state and its people is shifting radically. Individuality is emerging in societies that routinely shun such behaviour and repressive regimes are not pleased.
A recent University of Washington report reveals that 64 people have been arrested for blogging since 2003. Iran, China and Egypt are the main offenders.
In the West, blogging has become an essential part of the media, with millions of internet users cataloguing their daily lives. The US-based Co-operative Congressional Election Study has found that although political blogging is popular, only a minority of web users regularly engage with political bloggers. The study’s report confirms that readers “tend to visit blogs that share their viewpoint”.
The need for alternative sources of information, voices not processed through a Western journalist’s filter, became pronounced after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC. I shared the frustration of many with the mainstream media’s lack of insight into nations deemed Western enemies or allies.
Blogs offered a window into mainly middle-class segments of societies rarely examined in the West. What does a Saudi Arabian male think about his country’s adherence to Wahhabism? How does the average China web user cope with multinational-assisted filtering? What is Cuba’s likely future after Fidel Castro?
These are just a few of the issues that blogs have helped to elucidate.
My on-the-ground investigation of the blogging revolution and its influence on the relationship between the West and the rest took me to Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China. In these countries I met writers, bloggers, dissidents, politicians and journalists.
The subjects we discussed included the role of companies such as Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft in helping repressive regimes censor the internet.
The results were surprising. As one blogger told me in Tehran: “Most of the people (I knoware) in favour of reform, not revolution, because people are too tired to experience another revolution.” I found the same message echoed throughout the countries I visited: the desire to experience incremental change without foreign involvement.
Vocal activism was the exception, not the norm. Take China. A recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the vast majority of China’s web users — who number more than 250 million, the largest online community in the world — expressed support for Beijing managing or controlling the internet. A book editor in Shanghai explained to me that online filtering didn’t bother many Chinese, given that 99 per cent of blogs discussed food and daily life. He thought that most citizens questioned the sincerity of leaders who talked about “democracy with Chinese characteristics”. “Is China ready for free elections?” he asked sceptically.
Despite these realities, during the past decade there has been a steady increase in awareness about political rights, principally because of satellite television and the internet.
China’s leading video-sharing site, Tudou (which means couch potato), is reportedly bigger than YouTube, with more than one petabyte of daily data transfers. Tudou founder Gary Wang explains that officials phone in several times a week to demand the removal from the site of films they consider suspect. Wang is philosophical. Change is coming but it will take time. Political reform isn’t a priority for most citizens. Even though he spent years living in France and the US, Wang resents questions about “oppressive censorship” from Western reporters. “They seem to pity us,” he says.
Earlier this year, most Chinese bloggers reacted with outrage at what they perceived to be anti-Beijing coverage in the Western media of the pro-Tibet protests in Lhasa and the troubled Olympic torch relay. “For a long time now,” one of them wrote, “certain Western media, best represented by CNN and BBC, in the name of press freedom, have been unscrupulously slandering and defaming developing nations.”
I heard repeatedly during my visit to China, usually after a tirade against foreign journalists who rarely travel beyond Beijing, that satisfaction with the Communist Party regime is strong and growing. This doesn’t mean the Chinese endorse authoritarian methods. Rather, it means incremental change and battles against corruption are considered preferable to Western-style capitalism.
A separate global Pew Research Centre study conducted this year found 86 per cent of Chinese were happy with their country’s direction, double the 2002 figure. In comparison, only 23 per cent of Americans surveyed thought their nation was heading the right way.
Blogger Mica Yushu told me in Shanghai that most of her middle-class friends didn’t crave political change. “We use the internet mostly for entertainment, sharing information, earning money or other fun,” she said. The sight of darkened internet cafes across the country was something to behold, with thousands of users gaming, watching downloaded films and soft-core pornography, blogging and instant messaging. Politics seemed the furthest thing from these monitored minds.
China’s economic boom has mostly silenced the internal critics and agitators who do speak up pay a high price for challenging Beijing’s unelected clique.
Online culture is thriving in almost every country I visited. The exception is Cuba, although the elevation of Raul Castro to the presidency is slowly leading to economic and social perestroika, despite some politically tinged websites being blocked.
Most bloggers prefer to protest privately, anonymously or not at all. The fight against repression takes many forms, from drinking contraband vodka in Tehran to appropriating American hip-hop culture in Havana. The price of protesting in Egypt, one of the highest annual recipients of US aid, is likely to be imprisonment and torture.
Despite their relatively small numbers and the penalties they attract, dissenting bloggers are playing havoc with the established order. According to Human Rights Watch researcher Elijah Zarwan, “bloggers have succeeded in doing something that years of standing on the street corner and shouting ‘No to torture’ or ‘No to the interior ministry’ has never managed to accomplish”: putting these issues on the public agenda.
The small size of online communities in Syria and Saudi Arabia has not stopped bloggers from challenging authoritarian rule.
Neither country employs harsh online filtering, but users learn quickly there are lines that cannot be crossed.
Saudi Arabian actor Mohammad al-Qass explains that in a fundamentalist nation such as his, internal reform — for women’s rights and broader legal and social rights — needs space to develop. “Fifty years ago, Saudi Bedouins were riding around on camels. Now they’re using mobile phones and the best technology,” Qass says. “It will take time for society to catch up with this technology.”
Meanwhile, for the first time a more nuanced view of the West is being offered via the web, and it allows a woman in Damascus the freedom to admire Brad Pitt as well as pray five times a day at the local mosque. Cross-cultural pollination is occurring, no matter what the religiously pious may think about it.
The issue of online representation is central to this debate. I recently presented a paper in Budapest at the Harvard University and Google sponsored Global Voices Citizen Media Summit. While we heard countless tales of bloggers across the world using online tools to highlight police torture and corruption, many participants wondered about the voices we weren’t hearing online: such as those of minorities, the poor and Luddites uncomfortable with technology.
US writer Clay Shirky explains in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising Without Organisations that “communications tools (such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blogging) don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring”. In other words, it’s only now becoming possible to come across online the words of indigenous communities in Bolivia, dispossessed voters in Kenya or sex workers in India.
Letting people speak and write for themselves without a Western lens is one of the triumphs of blogging. The culture of blogging is unlike that of any previous social movement. Disjointed and disorganised, its aims are deliberately vague. While many want the right to be critical in the media, others simply crave the ability to date and listen to subversive music. That in itself is revolutionary for much of the world.
The Blogging Revolution by Antony Loewenstein (Melbourne University Press) is published next week.
Loewenstein will appear at the Melbourne Writers Festival, as well as at next month’s Brisbane Writers Festival.
