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I was interviewed yesterday by ABC7 on the sidelines of the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Summit. I’m fascinated by how news reporters pick a one sentence sound byte from a long interview. At the same event, AFP chose to quote me on how open (Western) democracies are curtailing freedom on the internet, while ABC 7 chose to quote me on how China is using its 50 Cents Party to control the internet through astroturfing instead of censorship.

My point was that US media’s obsession with internet censorship in China is misguided because of two reasons.

First,censorship is only one of the tools used by China to control the internet. Often, propaganda, surveillance and old-fashioned intimidation are more useful in controlling the internet in totalitarian regimes.

The use of the internet for propaganda, especially, threatens to convert our internet into spinternet. A case in point is China’s 50 Cent Party, which consists of 3,50,000 volunteers who are paid 50 cents for every comment they post supporting the Chinese Communist Party. Russia is, in fact, so successful in controlling the internet through propaganda that it doesn’t need to censor the internet. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have also started using blogs for propaganda.

Even more importantly, while China is one of the most extreme cases of internet censorship, it is also one of the simplest cases. To many of us, even more disturbing is the trend of open democracies like USA, UK, Australia, South Korea, India and Brazil closing down the internet by instituting over-strong pornography and cyber-crime regulations that can be misinterpreted and misused. Specifically, in the context of propaganda, these cases are more complex than the relatively simple case of China or Iran.

We know, for instance, that the Bush government used both mainstream media and the internet for domestic and foreign propaganda during the Iraq war. In another context, we also know that public relations agencies and lobbyists in the US regularly use the internet to spin misinformation and promote their self-serving agendas. Now, the same people are beginning to work closely with the State Department and the Department of Defense to use the internet for public diplomacy. With the boundaries between public/ private, defense/ diplomacy and domestic/ foreign becoming blurred, there are serious concerns about whether public diplomacy 2.0 is merely propaganda 2.0, meant to misinform and mystify both domestic and foreign audiences.

In the US media narrative, K Street lobbyists in the US are a minor annoyance, while the 50 Cent Party in China is a threat to human rights. However, to an objective third party observer (like yours truly), the K Street lobbyists look like better paid avatars of 50 Cent Party members. Perhaps, US media’s inability to connect the two narratives isn’t very different from the self-censorship of China’s government controlled news agencies.

My point is not that America is the same as China, Russia or Iran. America is a messy vibrant democracy where a million points of view compete with each other and K Street lobbyists co-exist with the Center for Media and Democracy. Also, the first amendment is, in many ways, a gold standard for freedom of expression and dissent is almost always is seen as a virtue rather than a crime.

My point is that the bad practices we condemn in totalitarian regimes are not unique to these regimes. Censorship, astroturfing, and overt propaganda are as pervasive, and as pernicious, in open democracies as in totalitarian regimes.

China, Russia and Iran do have a terrible track record on the abuse of human rights, including freedom of expression, and they do need to be taken to task by the international community. However, it’s even important that, as we condemn these “bad countries”, we continue to be wary of “bad practices” within our own glass houses.

Related posts:

1. Is the Debate on Internet & Human Rights Nothing More Than American Propaganda Against China?
2. Citizen Propaganda in Contemporary Conflicts: The Case of Israel-Gaza, Russia-Georgia and China-Tibet
3. OSI Forum: New Media in Authoritarian Societies
4. Check Out the Excellent Handbook of Online China Report from TrendsSpotting
5. Vote Report India Featured on America.gov