11 Aug 2011 | Uncategorized
In the wake of this week’s riots across the country, David Cameron today told parliament that the government is looking into banning people from using social networking sites if they are thought to be organising criminal activity.
Everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill.
And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.
Index on Censorship this afternoon released a statement in reaction to Cameron’s address:
David Cameron must not allow legitimate anger over the recent riots and looting in the UK to be used in an attack on free expression and free information. Too often, channels of communication, whether Twitter, Facebook or BlackBerry Messenger are seen as the culprits in acts of violence and anti-social behaviour, rather than merely the conduit. While police in investigations should be able to investigate relevant communications, there should be no power to pre-emptively monitor or suspend communications for ordinary social media users.
The Global Network Initiative also responded, saying:
A UK government response to ongoing violence that erodes legal due process or demonstrates a lack of respect for internationally recognized human rights and free speech norms could make it more difficult for Internet and telecommunications companies everywhere to resist surveillance and censorship requests of governments that infringe user rights.
Zeinobia at Egyptian Chronicles shared this sentiment:
Forget about Egypt, think about other countries that can be harmed , now Bashar El Assad and other dictators will boldly block and even shut down the internet to protect the society and its so-called stability.
Technology commentator Jeff Jarvis also outlined why a social media crackdown would be wrong:
Beware, sir. If you take these steps, what separates you from the Saudi government demanding the ability to listen to and restrict its BBM networks? What separates you from Arab tyrannies cutting off social communication via Twitter or from China banning it?
This regulatory reflex further exposes the danger of British government thinking it can and should regulate media. Beware, my friends. When anyone’s speech is not free, no one’s speech is free. I refer the honourable gentleman to this Censorship is not the path to civility. Only speech is.
Journalist and author Doug Saunders also dubbed the plans “draconian”. A post at The Atlantic Wire ran the omnious headline ”Twitter Braces for Censorship Following the UK Riots.” Meanwhile, internet freedom skeptic Evgeny Morozov seemed confused, tweeting:
I dunno whom to be believe: Gordon Brown said social media would stop next Rwanda and Cameron seems to be saying it would make next Rwanda.
Others pointed out that social media has indeed been utilised for good, having been a key tool in organising the widespread clean-ups that took place following the riots.
John Kennedy at Global Voices Online has translated a handful of Chinese netizens’ comments from the Sina Weibo microblog in response to the news that British police have begun arresting people on suspicion of using social media to organise rioting. One asked, “should we lend them our GFW [Great Firewall] then?” Another mused on what the future will be for China’s domestic microblogs, already used to combat the country’s sophisticated censorship tools: “I just wonder, will Beijing use this as an excuse now to get rid of Weibo, that thorn in their side?”
4 Aug 2011 | Asia and Pacific, China
The aftermath of the collision of two high-speed trains near the Chinese city of Wenzhou on 23 July has demonstrated that the limits of free expression in China are being tested more than ever before. Government officials keen to stifle public criticism have faced a backlash from defiant reporters and netizens.
The authorities say the crash, which killed 40 and left 191 injured, was caused by faulty signals, but the disaster is proving to be a major headache for Beijing. The government has swung from suppressing information to pledging greater openness around “sudden-breaking events and problems of key concern to the people”.
As Alice Xin Liu wrote on this blog last week, within hours of reporting the disaster, journalists received directives from the Central Propaganda Department demanding positive coverage. Reporters were told to focus on “extremely moving” stories, within an overall theme of “great love in the face of great disaster”. They were ordered not to question or elaborate on the causes of the crash and reminded that “the word from the authorities is all-prevailing”.
These official weekly instructions are usually heeded. This time, however, journalists were not as submissive.
A Saturday edition of the respected business paper, The Economic Observer, ran a nine-page feature with the headline, “No Miracles in Wenzhou”. The accompanying editorial was written in the form of a letter to a two-year-old girl found alive in the wreckage 21 hours after the crash, and several hours after rescue efforts were officially called off. Her discovery had earlier been deemed a “miracle” by a railway ministry spokesman. The editorial asked the child,
When you’re grown, will we and this country we live in be able to honestly tell you about all the love and suffering, anger and doubts around us?
Even the Communist party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, ran an editorial saying “we do not want a GDP that comes with blood”.
The Beijing News was less blatant. It ran a front-page article about the breakage of a Song dynasty bowl at a Beijing museum, with six shattered pieces representing the six derailed train carriages .
The authorities then attempted to rein in the media, asserting that “public opinion inside and outside China has begun to become complex”. Wang Qinlei, a producer for state broadcaster CCTV, was suspended over his programme 24 Hours, which featured footage of hospitalised victims and questioned whether the state was putting economic progress before its citizens’ welfare. Meanwhile, Chinese Business View was forced to pull three pages from its 29 July edition that had featured a variety of damning editorials, with one titled, “The Only Road to Rebuilding the Public’s Trust is to Seek Out the Truth”.
Alongside the refusal of state organs to tow the party line, officials have also had to manage an onslaught of anger and criticism from China’s internet users, who currently tip the scales at almost half a billion.
Users on Sina Weibo — China’s wildly popular answer to Twitter — furiously posted in their tens of millions, criticising the leaked propaganda directives and the government’s handling of the crash. 93 per cent of participants on a poll carried out by the microblog just days after the accident claimed they were “very dissatisfied” with the state’s response.
Public anger went into overdrive when footage emerged of officials apparently burying a train carriage soon after the crash. Accusations of a government cover-up poured in, with videos of the burial being posted across Chinese video-sharing websites. In response, Premier Wen Jiabao pledged a “thorough probe” into the crash.
What makes this tragedy — and its media fallout — all the more significant is that it is a display of precisely what Chinese journalists, netizens and the wider public had long feared and openly lamented: corruption scandals, questionable safety standards and an obsession with economic growth at the expense of the masses’ interests.
Combine these factors and the Communist Party is left under greater pressure than ever to speed up its political reform and put the brakes on its intense economic growth. Just how quickly or effectively this balance will be addressed remains to be seen, but the government’s authoritarian model of dealing with ever-expanding social forces is proving shaky. An increasingly defiant body of journalists and trailblazing netizens who are asserting their right to know, to express and to critique.
The authorities might hope public anger will cool but the Wenzhou tragedy caps a long sequence of attempts to cover up scandals — from tainted milk to fatally shoddy construction — and contain a fallout of public opinion that could damage the Communist Party’s legitimacy as the voice of authority. Having now been catapulted by such a poignant disaster that taps into several facets of public discontent, it is doubtful that this novel pressure for a more open media system in mainland China will ease anytime soon.
26 Jul 2011 | Uncategorized
In the days since Anders Behring Breivik — the accused perpetrator of Friday’s deadly attacks in Norway — has been identified as a Christian right-wing extremist, some liberals in the US have descended on the episode as another opportunity to draw a straight line between hard-right political causes and actual violence. The meme has been gaining steam since the early rise of the Tea Party, a group that occasionally celebrates its Second Amendment gun rights by toting weapons to public rallies.
“Norway, US, Worldwide — is Right-Wing Violence endemic?” asks a blog post on the popular liberal Internet enclave Fire Dog Lake. Explains the writer:
“Right-wing supporters, here in the US and around the world, have a long history of resorting to, or actually embracing, violence. People from politicians, to preachers to doctors have all been shot because of their perceived (and perhaps real) left leaning political views.”
The author then proceeds to compile a list of recent incidents involving right-wing violence, including mention of the January shooting of Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
ThinkProgress, a liberal blog affiliated with the progressive Center for American Progress, has published an oddly beside-the-point revelation that the “Norway Terrorist is a Global Warming Denier“, as if this contributes further damning evidence of the ideological similarity between mass murderers and run-of-the-mill conservatives. In another post, the blog cites “evidence that [Breivik] was a fan of far-right bloggers and political parties.”
It then uses the occasion to chastise Rep. Peter King, who has refused to include homegrown terrorism threats – read: threats from neo-Nazis and other domestic right-wing extremists — in his congressional hearings investigating the radicalisation of American Muslims. King, since the Norway attacks, has held to that position.
Of course, it would be preferable for King to abandon the hearings all together rather than to add domestic political partisans to his already dubious investigation of the Muslim community. But the hint of “endemic” right-wing violence poses a different challenge – and that’s that we head down a tricky path in trying to draw systemic conclusions about political ideology and specific incidents of bloodshed.
It’s possible — as has turned out to be the case with Giffords’ shooter — that the defining characteristic of Breivik and other such violent rogues isn’t their politics, but their mental instability. And conflating the two could be problematic for political speech in the long run.
Sarah Palin was widely indicted after the Giffords shooting, which left six dead in an Arizona strip-mall parking lot, for having produced a map of political opponents targeted in the 2010 election with gun-sight symbols over their districts. Pundits speculated that such a map could have motivated Jared Lee Loughner to take Palin’s suggestion literally. (Subsequently, there was no evidence Loughner ever even saw Palin’s campaign graphic.)
Since then, Americans have been struggling mightily with the consequences of political discourse, with what it means to be “civil” at a time of rising political acrimony, and with the murky causal connection between words, ideas and violent action. It’s an important discussion. But chalking up the Norway shooting as another example that “right-wing ideas = violence” doesn’t add much to it.
Joshua Foust, writing in The Atlantic, is equally firm on this point:
“In order to tar all of Europe’s right, even just the upsetting xenophobes clothing themselves in worry about jihad, you must demonstrate a causal mechanism by which concern over cultural outsiders becomes murderous rage against the very people you claim to protect (in this case, ethnic Norwegians). Without being too trite, it requires an especially deranged mind already far outside the mainstream to decide to slaughter children at summer camp just because it is run by a left-wing political party. Associating that sort of mentality with the mainstream is not just wrong and lazy, it is hypocritical.
Indeed, much of the Western’s left’s quasi-triumphalism over the Norwegian tragedy revolves around it’s complete non-relationship to Islamic terror. Here, so many seem to celebrate, is the proof they had finally sought that right-wing politics are not just annoying and wrong, but actively dangerous.”
That argument may be politically profitable in the short term. But in the long run, suggesting political beliefs — whether liberal or conservative — are synonymous with incitement to violence could wind up undermining the rights of even those making such an argument today.
11 Jul 2011 | Uncategorized
Omar al-Bashir’s government is determined to control the news media, says Abdelgadir Mohammed Abdelgadir
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