21 Mar 11 | Index Index, minipost
Google has blamed the Chinese government for disrupting its services after users experienced problems with accessing their emails. Some users have also claimed that their email accounts have been hacked into. Just over two weeks ago some Chinese Google email users were targets of hacking attempts that were described by Google as politically motivated, specifically aimed at activists.
08 Mar 11 | Index Index, minipost
Two journalists, Nedem Sener and Ahmet Sik, were sentenced to prison on Sunday pending an investigation into allegations that the military attempted to overthrow the Turkish government in 2003. About 60 journalists are currently imprisoned and thousands face prosecution for their work, reported the Turkish Journalists’ Association.
Meanwhile, there are other concerns about press freedom in Turkey; 600,000 bloggers cannot access their blogs, after Google’s blogging service, Blogspot, was blocked in the country, for example. The site was banned by a Turkish court after users showed football matches on their blogs. Digiturk, a satellite TV firm, has exclusive rights to broadcast the matches in Turkey and approached the courts when it became aware of the matches being shown on the blogs.
26 Jan 11 | Uncategorized
Blogs, chatrooms and comment pages are the perfect locations in cyberspace for those who wish to demean, harrass, and humiliate individuals. Hate speech has always been a problem for defenders of extensive liberty of expression, but the Internet provides open platforms, the cloak of anonymity, and Google-enhanced discoverability: a heady mix for any would-be vilifier.
Where once the foul thoughts of non-entities would fester in the obscurity of private diaries and ephemeral hand-printed flyers, today they can climb the Google rankings aided by the hidden hand of its impersonal algorithms. What floats to the surface via a search isn’t necessarily pleasant, and individuals are often powerless to take action against the taint of personal abuse.
The philosopher Brian Leiter has coined the term “cyber-cesspools” to describe these repositories of abuse. He argues in his contribution to The Offensive Internet (eds. Saul Levmore and Martha D Nussbaum) that US Constitutional law recognises limits to “low-value” speech, and penalises defamation in other contexts, yet fear of over-zealous self-censorship by website owners has discouraged extension of legal prohibitions into the virtual world.
What is special about Internet cyber-speech, he points out, is that it tends to be permanent, divorced from context, and available to anyone. The harms this can cause are real. His solution is to require Google to set up a panel of neutral arbitrators to investigate the claims of private individuals that they are being harmed by the search returns, and then to delist, offer the abused a right to reply, or require the site’s proprietor to offer evidence that neither course of action is merited.
Leiter’s identification of the problem is important, and his analysis of causes sound, but any solution should provide a better situation than the status quo. In many real cases the difficulty of sifting through vile abuse and counter-abuse, would make mucking out the Augean stables an attractive alternative. Who in their right minds would ever take on such a role? And as Leiter himself discovered, attempts to control cyber-cess often generate new and larger pools of abuse. Internet pollution won’t be going away soon, I fear. Perhaps our best hope is to develop greater tolerance.
21 Jan 11 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost
Google lifted some of its restrictions for on-line users in Iran on 21 January. Google unblocked access to Google Chrome, Google Earth and Picasa, previously US trade sanctions had prevented Iranian users from accessing the site. The restrictions are still in place for users linked to the Iranian government.
