Tagged: Censorship RSS

  • Gaurav Mishra 3:51 am on June 9, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Censorship, , , , , , , Jon Pincus, , , , , , , ,   

    My Talk on the Good and Bad Sides of Digital Activism at the CFP 2009 Conference 

    Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my feed now and you'll never miss a single post!

    I recently spoke at a panel on “Online Activism Around the World” with Nancy Scola, Ralf Bendrath and Jon Pincus at the Computers Freedom and Privacy 2009 Conference.

    Although I was supposed to speak about Vote Report India and digital activism in India, I ended up speaking about how social technologies are value-agnostic.

    At each of the four levels of Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence, social technologies can lead to both good and bad outcomes.

    User generated content can be used to break news or spread propaganda. Collective action can be used to organize protests against a totalitarian regime or perpetrate violence against its detractors. Online communities can create cosmopolitan open societies or cult-like closed ones. Collective intelligence can be used to benefit consumers and citizens or profile them for surveillance or commercial exploitation.

    Some highlights from the talks and the panel –

    - Why real political change will not be brought about by online activism, but by using online engagement to build real world institutions.

    - Why digital technologies don’t necessarily distribute power by default, but can also be used to centralize power.

    - Why the Obama administration might be the most sophisticated propaganda machine in the human history.

    I had fun being part of the panel. I hope you have fun watching it.

     

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  • Gaurav Mishra 11:03 pm on May 6, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: AFP, , Censorship, , , , Human Rights, , , , , , , ,   

    Is the Debate on Internet & Human Rights Nothing More Than American Propaganda Against China? 

    AFP quoted me on a story on the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Summit held at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale office on May 5 –

    Western countries have been striving to “close the Internet” in the names of causes such as fighting pornography or cyber crime, said Gaurav Mishra who blogs about happenings in India.

    The story was also reproduced in The Age, Brisbane Times, France 24, The Sydney Morning Herald, and CNN Money, amongst others.

    Taken out of context, my comment might sound strange, or even outrageous, so it’s important that I put it in context.

    The popular narrative about human rights and the internet is that there are two types of countries: open democracies like USA which have a free and open internet and closed totalitarian regimes like China which have a closed, censored internet. However, as the internet is “essentially free and borderless”, the hope is that, over time, it will make these closed societies more open, more like Western democracies.

    This narrative is flawed at two levels.

    First, the internet isn’t inherently free or borderless. It has already become evident that governments have both the will and the means to force the internet to conform to the rules and regulations within their national boundaries. It has also become evident that the internet itself, like any other technology, is neutral and value-agnostic. So, it can be used for free expression and activism, but it can also be used for propaganda and suveillance. China, Russia and Iran, amongst other repressive regimes, are using a combination of censorship, astrofurfing and old school intimidation to control the internet, in one form or another.

    Second, the internet in the open (Western) democracies isn’t really open anymore. Open democracies like USA, UK, Australia, South Korea, India and Brazil are closing down the internet in many ways by instituting over-strong pornography and cyber-crime regulations that censor content at ISP level, limit anonymity by linking internet access to real world identity, and force internet companies to share user data. Most of these regulations are supposed to protect internet users, but in the hands of extremist or paranoid elements in these open democracies, they can be easily misinterpreted and misused.

    So, my fear is that both open democracies and closed totalitarian regimes are moving towards each other and will meet in an unhappy middle that is very different from the free and open internet we know today.

    The discussion around internet and human rights needs to move beyond its US-centric China-Russia-Iran fixation to include “open” democracies like USA, UK, Australia, South Korea, India and Brazil. Unless the focus of this discussion changes from “bad countries” to “bad practices”, there’s a risk that it will be seen as nothing more than US propaganda against unfriendly countries.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 12:38 am on January 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Censorship, , Communism, , , Public Sphere, , , Vietnam   

    Vietnam’s Government’s Efforts to Control Blogging Part of an International Trend 

    Tim Johnson in The Washington Post reports that Vietnam’s communist government has taken several steps in recent months to curtail blogging in the country.

    These include giving police broad authority to move against online critics of the government, banning obscenity and debauchery, punishing bloggers in court, and putting pressure on Yahoo! and Google, who host the most popular blogging platforms in the country.

    Out of Vietnam’s overall population of 88 million, almost 24 million people regularly use the web and they have been quick to use blogging to circumvent the state media’s tight control on news. Much of the discussion, often based on stories from foreign media outlets, is frequently critical of the government. However, after a period of relative freedom, the authorities have started to limit the freedom of the country’s vibrant blogosphere.

    While Western media loves to focus on censorship in communist countries like China and Vietnam, I am seeing a tendency to impose controls over what citizens can or cannot do online across a range of countries, from United States, Australia and United Kingdom to India, using some of the same tactics. Perhaps, the internet has become too much of a public sphere for most governments.

    Cross-posted at Social Media in Business, Development and Government.

     

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