15 Feb 2011 | Digital Freedom, Uncategorized
Anyone interested in free expression will be anticipating Hillary Clinton’s speech on web freedom today, particularly as in light of recent events throughout the Middle East, it seems that one cannot really talk about web freedom without meaning, well, freedom freedom.
Clinton is expected to say:
“Together, the freedoms of expression, assembly, and association online comprise what I have called the freedom to connect. The United States supports this freedom for people everywhere, and we have called on other nations to do the same… “
The speech continues:
“We are convinced that an open Internet fosters long-term peace, progress and prosperity. The reverse is also true. An Internet that is closed and fractured, where different governments can block activity or change the rules on a whim—where speech is censored or punished, and privacy does not exist—that is an Internet that can cut off opportunities for peace and progress and discourage innovation and entrepreneurship…”
There is a certain irony to the privacy comments, with Clinton’s speech coming on the same day that the US is attempting to force Twitter to hand over details of Wikileaks-linked users.
Index will be publishing reaction to the speech from a range of experts, plus the full text of the speech. In the meantime, here are some snippets, courtesy of Politico’s Laura Rozen.
7 Feb 2011 | Americas, Mexico
In Mexico, politicians have began using social media to campaign. But they seem baffled as to how to deal with angry voters.
State Governor Enrique Peña Nieto, potentially the next presidential candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), stopped using Twitter when voters got cranky. “Twitter demands more horizontal communication and more dialogue, more exposure to criticism,” says one blog that reviewed how Peña Nieto’s handlers chose Facebook, where a clique of fans is more acceptable.
But the one politician who has forged ahead on Twitter is Manuel Lopez Obrador, the 2012 presidential candidate for the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party. According to Rendon who measured both candidates use of Twitter, Lopez Obrador, is prolific in this medium. To date he has almost 56,000 followers.
If you’re measuring the number of followers, the winner is President Felipe Calderon, with 400,000 followers. But on Twitter, power and influence is measured by the amount of retweets and the winner in this category — despite having only 17,000 — followers is Gerardo Fernandez Noroña, a congressman for the leftist Workers Party PT. Fernandez Noroña’s appeal is that he argues with his followers; those who dare to contradict him are targeted with colorful language.
In the last two years, Twitter has become a big hit in Mexico. When it was launched few in Mexico thought it would take off. But in 2009, it had 32,000 accounts. By January 2010, this had grown to 146,000 accounts. By June 2010, the number had jumped to 1,835,372 accounts.
As media analyst and academic Maria Elena Meneses says, 2012, the year of the next presidential election, will be the year of Twitter in Mexico.
29 Jan 2011 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
The cell phones started working this morning again, although I’m not sure they’ll stay that way. The internet (as of 7pm local time) was still blocked. The fact that one but not the other has been restored perhaps indicates that the government views the internet as a larger threat than phone calls and text messages.
Whatever the logic, its worth noting that all these government attempts to restrict communications did very little to hinder the protesters yesterday and today.
The #Jan25 Day of Rage that kicked off the current waves of civil unrest rocking President Hosni Mubarak’s government DID employ Facebook, Twitter and text messaging as crucial tools. Last minute notifications on where to gather went out electronically at first. And all through the day on 25 January, protesters used Twitter to coordinate, offer each other encouragement and get news about protests happening elsewhere. When clashes happened in Suez or Alexandria, the protesters in Tahrir instantly knew and took heart from it. If there was thousands fighting the reach the square, they knew that too.
But if protests on 25 January took place in the context of a veritable flood of information, yesterday’s massive demonstrations happened in a literal vacuum. Suddenly dragged back to the land-line communications era, the protesters didn’t know about Alexandria or Suez; they didn’t even know what was happening across the river.
It didn’t matter. Protest organisers basically bypassed the idea of coordination altogether and just told people “Protest everywhere.”
In anything, the information vacuum may have ended up sharpening the wills of the demonstrators. With no idea of the situation anywhere else in Egypt, protesters had no choice by to fight like hell for whatever public patch of ground they were standing on—and then fight their way through to the next patch of ground.
All through the day Friday and deep into the night, Cairo seemed to have reverted to a word-of-mouth storyteller society. If you were walking in the street and you saw protesters coming the other direction, you asked them where they were coming from and what the situation was like there.
The shutdown also didn’t manage to stop the world’s media from effectively conveying the story to the world. Correspondents generally found a way to get online or, in many cases, reverted to the old-school practice of dictating their stories and notes to the newsroom over a landline.
Perhaps the largest impact was that many photographers and videographers have amazing images and footage trapped on their cameras with no way to get them out. I personally know several people in this situation.
When the government does finally lift the country-wide internet blockade, look for an absolute flood of imagery to instantly start flowing.
29 Jan 2011 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features
The Egyptian government has cut mobile telephone and internet services, Index on Censorship’s Egypt regional editor Ashraf Khalil reports on how the information vacuum affected yesterday’s “day of rage”
The cell phones started working this morning again, although I’m not sure they’ll stay that way. The internet (as of 7pm local time) was still blocked. The fact that one but not the other has been restored perhaps indicates that the government views the internet as a larger threat than phone calls and text messages.
Whatever the logic, it’s worth noting that all these government attempts to restrict communications did very little to hinder the protesters yesterday and today.
The #Jan25 Day of Rage that kicked off the current waves of civil unrest rocking President Hosni Mubarak’s government DID employ Facebook, Twitter and text messaging as crucial tools. Last minute notifications on where to gather went out electronically at first. And all through the day on 25 January, protesters used Twitter to coordinate, offer each other encouragement and get news about protests happening elsewhere. When clashes happened in Suez or Alexandria, the protesters in Tahrir instantly knew and took heart from it. If there was thousands fighting to reach the square, they knew that too.
But if protests on 25 January took place in the context of a veritable flood of information, yesterday’s massive demonstrations happened in a literal vacuum. Suddenly dragged back to the landline communications era, the protesters didn’t know about Alexandria or Suez; they didn’t even know what was happening across the river.
It didn’t matter. Protest organisers basically bypassed the idea of coordination altogether and just told people “Protest everywhere.”
In anything, the information vacuum may have ended up sharpening the wills of the demonstrators. With no idea of the situation anywhere else in Egypt, protesters had no choice by to fight like hell for whatever public patch of ground they were standing on—and then fight their way through to the next patch of ground.
All through the day Friday and deep into the night, Cairo seemed to have reverted to a word-of-mouth storyteller society. If you were walking in the street and you saw protesters coming from the other direction, you asked them where they were coming from and what the situation was like there.
The shutdown also didn’t manage to stop the world’s media from effectively conveying the story to the world. Correspondents generally found a way to get online or, in many cases, reverted to the old-school practice of dictating their stories and notes to the newsroom over a landline.
Perhaps the largest impact was that many photographers and videographers have amazing images and footage trapped on their cameras with no way to get them out. I personally know several people in this situation.
When the government does finally lift the country-wide internet blockade, look for an absolute flood of imagery to instantly start flowing.
Read Ashraf Khalil’s “Uncut” blog here
