Webs@Work

If the number of arrests is a metric for assessing the growing impact of blogging on political life, then 2007 was indeed significant. The World Information Access Report says a record number of bloggers was arrested last year with Egypt, Iran and China the most dangerous places to blog about political life. These countries account for more than half of all the blogger arrests.

Since 2003, 64 citizens unaffiliated with news organizations have been arrested for their blogging activities. The report says these bloggers expose bureaucratic corruption or human rights abuses and express opinions about political figures and public policy options.

They run foul of the law for posting reports and photos from social protests, writing about political artwork, or sharing images and texts deemed to have violated cultural norms.

The Committee to Protect Journalists meanwhile says China remains the world’s leading jailer of journalists and writers. Beijing also exerts control over its fast-growing Internet sector, seeking to weed out porn and subversive websites.

China’s censorship of the Web has drawn flak from European Union telecoms chief Viviane Reding who says the Beijing Olympics are a chance for Beijing to show its commitment to free flow of information. Ms Reding, who is the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media does not think blocking of sites for political reasons is the right way to proceed.

The cyclone that hit Burma on 2 May succeeded where the junta failed last September in destroying phone and Web access out of Burma. But this has not stopped Burmese exiles and people in Burma from posting information and stories to the Web.

Photo courtesy Manfred Rist

Photo courtesy Manfred Rist

First-hand accounts of the devastation continue to trickle out of Burma weeks after the disaster. Despite efforts by the ever-watchful military authorities to suppress reports on the aftermath of the cyclone, many blogs and news sites have now emerged to track the devastation.

These sites have been quick to react by posting vivid eyewitness accounts of the disaster and mobilising fundraising efforts. The Mizzima news site, based in India and run by Burmese exiles has been carrying interviews with survivors who tell harrowing tales of life after the storm.

Eyewitness reports are available on exile Burmese news sites such as Yoma3 and blogs by the Burmese diaspora such as Fear from Freedom and the US-based Golden Colour Revolution, run by Ko Moe Thee, a well-known student leader from the 1988 uprising.

The Irrawwady keeps the spotlight on the humanitarian crisis with extensive coverage. Its daily updates have attracted record numbers of readers to the site, which received more than 60 million hits in May.

Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma is a non-profit media organization run by Burmese expatriates. It makes radio and TV broadcasts aimed at providing uncensored news and information about Burma.

The Moegyo Humanitarian Foundation blog by a group of Burmese expatriates is documenting efforts to track the situation and to organise aid.

Check out Ko Htike’s Prosaic Collection which is in Burmese, or The Rule of Lords which posts regular translations of the most compelling stories from Burmese news sites.

Within Burma, blogs such as The New Era Journal and those by people such as Dr Lun Swe, and Nyi Lynn Seck and have been giving updates in Burmese from the disaster zone.

Related sites:
Online Burma Library
BBC Burmese Service
Asian Human Rights Commission - Nargis page
Relief Web - Nargis page
Red Cross Red Crescent - Nargis photo gallery
Burmese Government website

Parliamentarians who blog are now a dime a dozen. But bloggers who become parliamentarians are a new breed, and Malaysia is possibly the first country to have the most number of bloggers enter Parliament after the stunning success of the opposition in Saturday’s elections.

The shift in the political use of digital media tools cannot be underestimated as a resurgent opposition chart what has been hailed as a new era in Malaysian politics. It is compelling to conclude that cyberspace was where the election was lost as Malaysians desert mainstream media and turn to alternative information platforms for political news and views.

Except for former copywriter Jeff Ooi who has a domain, the bloggers who triumphed over their ruling party opponents in the elections used little more than a free blog host like WordPress.com and Blogspot.com to raise alternative views and funds to counter incumbent sloganeering and a hostile mainstream media.

Blogs proved a potent tool for the Davids who slayed the Goliaths in the ruling National Front coalition to enter parliament. They include Oxford-educated Tony Pua for PJ Utara, human rights activist and political consultant Elizabeth Wong for Bukit Lanjung and NikNazmi Nik Ahmad for Seri Setia.

Interestingly in Rembau, school teacher blogger Badrul Hisham aka Chegubard lost to National Front candidate and son-in-law of PM Abdullah, Khairy Jamaluddin who managed to squeak through by countering late in the campaign with a blog of his own and a Website www.rembau.net.

Of course prominent opposition leaders like Democratic Action Party chief Lim Kit Siang and Parti Keadilan Rakyat leader Anwar Ibrahim already post multiple blogs. Parti Islam SeMalaysia even has editing suites to support candidate Websites that live stream press conferences and PAS Internet TV.

We cannot conclude that online campaigning affected outcomes, but the swing in votes was most pronounced in cities and towns. Kuala Lumpur had 10 out of 11 federal parliament seats falling to the opposition. Penang had 11 out of 13 parliamentary seats to opposition and 29 out of 40 state seats. These major urban areas did matter in the final tally that combines with rural areas, to deny the ruling National Front coalition a two-thirds majority.

Sex, lies and video sleaze peppered cyber soap operas in the run-up to the elections. Bloggers pushed parameters of legitimate opinion with the shrill subtext of their unruly discourse.

The elections are over but the drama is just beginning. The processes and structures of debate could prove far messier post-election. It remains to be seen how these blogger-parliamentarians will use the promise of civic media to distinguish themselves and fulfill their electoral mandate.

Related Read:
Reuters: Malaysia opposition win shows power of cyberspace
Straits Times: Battle Lost in Cyberspace

Did the Web make a difference in the elections in Malaysia? Early results show the opposition are set to trounce the ruling Barisan Nasional as blogger-politicians poise to make history. The opposition has taken the northern island state of Penang, with blogger Jeff Ooi successfully using his blog as a platform to launch a political career.

Ooi contested a seat for the opposition Democratic Action Party, which has claimed victory in Penang, ousting the government for the first time since 1969. Economic grievances, inter-religious disputes and unfulfilled pledges have spawned a unifying disillusionment with PM Abdullah’s administration, eroding popular support for his United Malays National Organization party at the ballot box.

The blogosphere heralds a new reality in democratic citizenship as agile opponents use the Web to rustle up support and deny the ruling coalition of its near monopoly over information flow. Independent Websites and blogs such as Malaysia Today and Malaysiakini have kindled lively debates to challenge the ruling coalition stranglehold over TV and radio. They engage their publics around complex, controversial subjects in which mainstream media are seen to have failed to address and convince citizens.

Media analyst Mustafa Kamal Anuar said, ”A lot more people have become more discerning especially after recent demonstrations revealed the stark contrast between the mainstream media’s coverage and the bloggers.” Last week, the senior cabinet minister who heads the ethnic Indian party in the ruling coalition was jeered when he officiated at a dance competition in Penang. It would have passed unnoticed if a video of that incident had not been quickly posted on YouTube.

Certainly the Web has lowered barriers to political participation and revitalized civic life. In the northeast constituency of Kuala Terengganu, a barely literate 89-year-old granny has outfitted her campaign with every trick from the Web 2.0 toolkit.

Like her Western counterpart Barack Obama, Maimun Yusuf, the oldest election candidate in Malaysia, reached out to her voters with a Facebook profile. It’s set up by her Web savvy supporters who are also running a blog for her, a Gmail account, a YouTube channel and a Picasa album.

Web 2.0 tools empower individuals and provide new opportunities for political involvement. Detractors may argue for methodologies to isolate the cyber chatter and quantify the effect of online videos on Youtube to determine whether online participatory culture translates into tangible offline outcomes. The trouncing handed out to Barisan National speaks for itself.

Now here’s a clear signal to plaintiffs contemplating court gambits and meritless lawsuits to censor Web sites. Bank Julius Baer has blinked in the Wikileaks staredown, but don’t expect to see the end of it. After losing their fight over an injunction, the Swiss bank backed down, filing a brief notice to dismiss the case - without prejudice.

The bank had said Wikileaks displayed stolen documents revealing confidential information about the accounts of the bank’s clients. It triggered a constitutional furore after filing a complaint that led a US District Court to order Wikileaks to shut down.

Last week, in the face of widespread media attention and rights-groups action, Judge White dissolved his previous orders, allowing the wikileaks.org domain name to go back up. The judge said he was worried about its First Amendment implications and that he thought it might not be possible to prevent viewing of the documents once they were posted on the Web.

Related read:
Wikileaks: Web Censorship Won’t Work

The order by a California court to muzzle anti-corruption site Wikileaks smacks of contempt for free speech online that parallels practices in repressive countries committed to Web censorship. As feeble as it is offensive, this abuse refocuses attention on the idea of a whistle-blower wiki whose time has come.

Prompted not by government but corporate interests, the restraining order on Wikileaks betrays an ignorance of the Internet domain system and an unfamiliarity with the instinct of Web communities to counter hostile action against free online speech. Outraged netizens have rushed to publicize alternate addresses of backup sites that remain online in defiance. The gag order has the opposite effect of what it intended.

Wikileaks is up from Sweden at (http://88.80.13.160) and mirror sites hosted in Belgium (http://wikileaks.be/), Germany (http://wikileaks.de) and the Christmas Islands (http://wikileaks.cx). Fans of Wikileaks have distributed copies of the offending bank information on their sites and via peer-to-peer file sharing networks. Now even folks who have not heard of Wikileaks or Julius Baer know about the fiasco.

Swiss Bank Julius Baer, registered in the Cayman Islands, sued Wikileaks and successfully requested that its Website be blocked. Wikileaks had posted documents about off-shore trust structures in the Cayman Islands which allegedly implicate Baer in money laundering and tax evasion. Baer claims Wikileaks published and altered documents stolen by a former executive. A recap of Wikileaks coverage of Bank Julius Baer is mirrored here.

Founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and computer specialists from around the world, Wikileaks is a wiki platform for whistle-blowers to safely post documents in a manner that cannot be traced. Other users could then analyse the information and discuss its reliability and significance.

Wikileaks says it has published more than 1.2 million documents. They uncover dirt ranging from rules of engagement for American troops in Iraq to the operation of prison at Guantánamo Bay. Though it focuses on government and corporate wrong-doing in Asia, Africa and Middle East, Wikileaks has received most attention with secrets revealed in the US, Europe and Caribbean.

This major test of First Amendment rights is unheard of in the West. As the case heads for the appeals court, one wonders why Wikileaks must explain the meaning of the First Amendment in the land of free speech. “There is no justification under the First Amendment for shutting down an entire Web site,” say David Ardia, Director of Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School:

First, the banks overreached. They worked out what appears to be a sweetheart deal with Wikileaks’ domain name registrar, Dynadot. Even though Dynadot appears to bear no liability for the material at issue, the banks added Dynadot as a defendant in the case.

No doubt thinking they had come up with a legal “silver bullet,” the banks and Dynadot signed a joint stipulation in which Dynadot agreed to, among other things, “lock” and “disable the wikileaks.org domain name” in exchange for being dismissed from the case (a case in which, it appears, Dynadot bore no liability). To give their stipulation the force of law, the banks slipped an order to the judge, which he promptly signed.

DAVID ARDIA
Director of Citizen Media Law Project, Harvard Law School

Wikileaks is getting legal help in its court fight. Freedom of speech group, The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and digital rights advocacy, Electronic Frontier Foundation plan to argue on its behalf at a legal hearing on 29 February.

On another note, the European Parliament has accepted a move by Dutch conservative member Jules Maaten to consider Web censorship a trade barrier. This was first reported in Dutch, on the Web site of Maaten’s political party, the VVD. When the proposal is accepted, the EU has to take measure against countries who deploy Web censorship.

Related reads
Wikileak Blog
A Coming Chill over Internet Freedom

Here’s a great guide on citizen media, aimed at non-technical readers. Produced by Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices Online, An Introduction to Citizen Media, offers context and case studies on how people across the world use blogs, podcasts, Web video and digital photography to engage in an unmediated conversation transcending borders, cultures and languages. A Spanish version is available.

From the Introduction:

A change is taking place in how we communicate. Just ten years ago we learned about the world from newspapers, the television, and radio. Professional journalists would go to faraway places and bring back stories, photographs and videos of situations they witnessed and people they met.

Just ten years ago we rarely, if ever, communicated directly with the journalists themselves. Leading members of society wrote editorials expressing their opinions about various issues, but the rest of us could only share our opinions and thoughts with a small group of friends.

Bow thanks to new tools like weblogs, it is now possible to easily publish to the Internet. From Turkey to Kenya to Bolivia, everyday people are starting to share stories and opinions with the rest of the world. While this new form of communication is now freely available, most people participating still live in the wealthy neighborhoods of urban cities.

While there are already several excellent introductions to the principles of citizen media, they tend to focus on citizen media initiatives in North America and Western Europe. This guide hopes to showcase some of the most exciting and innovative developments on citizen media in the non-Western world.

There’s a zero-sum flavor to the arguments of Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, at the Hugo Young memorial lecture in London. Misdiagnosing the threat facing media today, he warned that reliable news reporting is dwindling in the face of bloggers.

Dubbing the Internet a “media tsunami,” Keller flailed at blogs and pilloried sites like Wikipedia and Google News, insulting the Web products for not having things like foreign bureaus in war zones and because they don’t create content but aggregate it from other media.

“The civic labour performed by journalists on the ground cannot be replicated by legions of bloggers sitting hunched over their computer screens,” he declared. Hold it a sec. Google News and Wikipedia never claimed to be a news organization.

While the dinosaurs lay their last eggs and take swings at the new pamphleteers, perhaps we should revisit the history of The Press to remind ourselves why it exists. Perhaps at the top of their pyramids, old media dinosaurs fail to see that they have lost their monopoly on information.

Rather than being the sole source of information they once was, the press and TV are now part of a new information distribution structure. Content will always be king, and readers will go to wherever they can get the highest quality, most credible news. Good journalism is always in demand, whoever delivers it.

There is room for bloggers to contribute to the conversation. Instead of competing, bloggers and journalists should focus on good reporting. No model has worked so far. In a truly robust press, trained journalists and ordinary folks work to improve understanding of the communities. Professionals form the backbone with citizens in their various communities providing ideas, information, and old-fashioned legwork.

Well and good, problem is why would people offer time and knowledge to help out the journalists? The results of the Assignment Zero debacle portend the potential of citizen journalism. The concept of user-generated content is in danger of becoming a distraction from the real discussion about how professional journalism will navigate the rapids of technological evolution.

Steve Outing said recently in an item on the demise of his user content-powered Enthusiast Group, “I believe that what user content needs to succeed as a business is professional editors to be the ones to sift through it all to find the stuff that people will care about.”

Crowd sourcing works fine if you want to buy stuff and exchange verifiable info with peers in a Web forum. But news consumers want accurate, reliable, fair, credible, relevant and useful information which the citizen journalism model has yet to provide.

Michael Hedges notes in his Follow the Media post that citizen journalism, a term invented by accountants, is past its prime when listeners, viewers and readers lost interest in ‘reports’ from the 16-year old on the corner with a cell-phone camera:

Blogs, touted as giving voice to many, became, largely, ranters ranting to themselves or PR people posting the daily spin. Blog creation has peaked, wrote the Pew Research Center in a 2007 report. The successful became niche publishers, albeit of the traditional media model. The rest are just out there, hanging by the Web.

User-generated content is another concept designed to warm the accountants’ books. Couple it with the much vaunted social networking sites and zillions of web hits are created. All content may, indeed, be equal for 20 year old user/creators but an adult looking for knowledge and clarity is left empty. Unfortunately, sources for adults have evaporated into the dither of click-through ads

All said, is there a self-sustaining Website that actually practices journalism out there? Kara Swisher, who covers technology for the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital said this of Keller’s speech:

Actually, I think Keller’s real problem is the audience, especially young people, who are increasingly using those sites and others. The fact of the matter for an awfully long time now is that consumers of information are sampling all over the Web and don’t just rely solely on the New York Times for info.

That’s too bad for Keller, I guess, but not bad at all for consumers, who Keller never assumes are discerning at understanding what they are getting. But they are and are simply not a mass of dumb sheep just taking it all in and not questioning anything.

But I cannot imagine he lives in the present-day world when he claimed in the speech: “Most of the blog world does not even attempt to report. It recycles. It riffs on the news. That’s not bad. It’s just not enough. Not nearly enough.”

This is simply not true going forward, and he should have done some reporting on the subject to find out. There is an ever-increasing number of online outlets who are doing most excellent online reporting.

Read his full text here.

2008 is beginning to look like 1984 behind the Great Firewall. China’s economic juggernaut reveals its darker side yet again as Beijing moves to nip a blossoming online video industry in the bud with new rules that could block YouTube and other services in the country.

Starting Jan 31, sites that provide video programming or allow users to upload video must have a permit and be either state-owned or state-controlled. Permits for video hosting sites will be subject to renewal every three years and operators who commit violations may be banned for up to 5 years.

Politically or morally objectionable content will be forbidden under the new rules. That digital contraband would include politically sensitive messages about racial minorities and human rights as well as sexual images, although most are banned already. Providers will be required to delete such content if it is uploaded and to report each incident to the State.

This new policy about video sharing sites may or may not be a big deal. Youtube was blocked for several weeks at the end of 2007 after a Chinese version of their site was launched, but normally there is no official notification or justification that a service has stopped working. One day, you can access it and the next day it is blocked.

Perhaps Youtube will become semi permanently blocked like Wikipedia, but Google has a history of adapting itself to be compliant with China’s culture of Internet censorship. It is more likely that the China’s Youtube copysites like tudou.com will have to register with and be subject to more control from the Chinese government.

CATSHANGHAI

To be sure massive censorship in the US exists though mostly driven by special interest groups and corporate advertisers. These manipulate investigative reporting and block facts from getting into the media by threatening to pull ad dollars from newspapers and TV stations.

Google is well known to the gay blogging community for unfair adjudication of standards when it comes to adwords account approvals. It is known in China to be a partner and advocate of censorship as long as currency, American or Chinese, is involved.

While the statute could limit online video to state-controlled media sites and ban foreign-owned video-hosting sites, it may also go unenforced, serving more as a threat to coerce video-hosting sites to police themselves. China’s popular video websites are run by private companies, and have in recent years been the focus of attention from venture-capital investors.

If it feels like everyone is crying “wolf” or “totalitarian” too early, it bears remembering that China is a hotbed of bad Internet activity. Presently the government lacks the technology to filter video as selectively as it filters text. The move may scare sites into censoring the content authorities want banned.

All said, the Chinese are fine, hard working people with a great and proud history. You can’t stop the Chinese, but it’s unfortunate that a state with a distrust in its own citizens has chosen affirmation power through control of information.

Related post:
Journey Into China’s Internet Censorship

Can Web video bring the world closer? Images alone can’t effect change but people moved by the imagery can. Let 2008 be the defining moment.

On May 10, Websites in Cairo, Dharamsala, Kigali, London, New York City, Ramallah, Rio de Janeiro and Tel Aviv will be linked to produce a four-hour program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music.

Known as Pangea Day, the program will be broadcast live to the world through the Web, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

To register as a film-maker or learn how to get involved, visit http://www.pangeaday.org. Here’s the trailer:

Check out the Engagemedia wiki to review the best available tools for the creation, playback and embedding of online video using Free and Open Source Software video codecs. There’s also a set of recommendations for development to enhance their adoption by social change video projects on the web. You can give your feedback here. PDF Version

Two new Web ventures tapping wisdom of the crowd distributed journalism to report the US presidential campaign could change how politics is covered. OffTheBus.net is three months old and Scoop08.com is set to launch today. Both enterprises want to tackle imaginative, under-reported stories with armies of citizen reporters and editors who will be working for nothing.

The ambition of young Americans to have an impact on our political scene may be our saving grace. Bravo to Scoop08 co-founders Alexander Heffner and Andrew Mangino for kicking off “A New Kind of Newspaper,” where 400+ students will cover the 2008 presidential campaign. If you grow up with a sense that you can speak and be heard, you may bother to participate more throughout your life. Experiments of the sort that they are undertaking give reason for hope that the Internet may yet help to fuel the civic involvement of young Americans, now and into the future.

JOHN PALFREY, Executive Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Young Americans mark their growing engagement in politics with Scoop08, an ambitious daily online newspaper by and for college and high school students to fill a “void” in student journalism and provide imaginative coverage of the campaign in ways mainstream media does not.

Beats range from democracy, political theory and combat and conflict to financial aid and technology. Special correspondents cover ethics, social networking and rhetoric. The enterprise relies on the commitment of volunteer students, supported by an advisory board that includes established journalists.

Social networking sites, including Facebook and MySpace, are in the Scoop08 armoury as it prepares to compete with the mainstream media. They plan to use video clips, blogs and podcasts on the site, as well as more conventional reports, to draw in a younger audience.

There is an increasingly politically engaged generation that is able to network online and to work professionally, academically and socially in this venue.

ALEXANDER HEFNER, Founder and Editor, Scoop08

OTB is run by Arianna Huffington, who publishes OffTheBus along with Jay Rosen at New York University, who experimented with distributed journalism in NewsAssignment Net. It’s aim is to produce a more nuanced picture than one reporter could do.

For example, up to 100 people can work an hour a day over two days to produce work that would take a reporter two months to do. In one project that followed Obama organizers in a dozen states in a day of national canvassing.

Some two dozen OTB correspondents fanned out, filling out a uniform sheet (how many doors knocked on, etc.) and offering their observations. Like stringers in the field, they send back reports to be compiled by an OTB writer. An online organizer based in New York is creating a roster from a community of OTB’s 1,500 members. One volunteer built a Wiki compiling information on staff members of the campaigns.

Others involved examining financial data from candidates, looking at political polling and seeking people across the country to share experiences when a pollster calls. OTB editors learnt that citizen journalists need journalistic guidance and have hired an editorial director to set standards.

Whether these ventures sky-rocket or fizzle, their very existence reflects a social shift that politicians ignore at their peril. Young Web savvy voters, traditionally seen as apathetic, are becoming more active voters - and there are more and more of them. At least in America.

Avaaz.org a community of global citizens acting on the major issues facing the world, is running an online petition for Burma on its site. The group has sent tens of thousands of messages to foreign ministers in Europe and Asia, raised funds for Burmese groups and run a global ad campaign.

Now it wants to grow the petition to a million names and deliver it formally to the Security Council itself, to push them to go further and mediate talks in Burma. Over 820,000 supporters have signed up. You can sign the petition here.