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Ed Webb

BBC News - Internet access is 'a fundamental right' - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8548190.stm

internet rights survey opinion bbc

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Countries such as Mexico, Brazil and Turkey most strongly support the idea of net access as a right, the survey found. More than 90% of those surveyed in Turkey, for example, stated that internet access is a fundamental right - more than those in any other European Country.
Ed Webb

The end of Skype in Egypt | Bikya Masr - 1 views

bikyamasr.com/?p=10025

Egypt telephony skype censorship mobile telephones India UAE

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Mar 10 - Cached
  • the lobbying of the three Egyptian mobile operators, Vodafone, Mobinil and Etisalat have won the most recent battle with regulators to ban the Internet phone service
  • “Now, I don’t think I will be able to talk to my brother in Virginia because it is too expensive. I don’t make enough money to buy a computer and get the Internet at home,”
  • In September, Indian agencies recommended a ban on international internet telephony until a system to trace the calls was put in place.
Ed Webb

Is That Egyptian Facebook Sign for Real? (Updated) | techPresident - 0 views

techpresident.com/...ian-facebook-sign-real-updated

Egypt #jan25 protests media internet socialmedia symbols

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • One takeaway: the debate over what real true role of the Internet (and Facebook, and Twitter) has been in this historic Egypt uprising has to include consideration of what the idea that is the Internet (and Facebook, and Twitter) means to the ones doing the rising up.
Ed Webb

Sorting through claims about the internet and revolutions, part 1 - 0 views

dfreelon.org/...nternet-and-revolutions-part-1

internet Egypt #jan25 protests twitter facebook socialmedia analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 05 Feb 11
     
    Typology
Ed Webb

Why the Internet Is a Great Tool for Totalitarians | Magazine - 0 views

www.wired.com/...st_essay_totalitarians

opinion internet morozov repression authoritarianism US USA politics

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Modern communications technologies are already being deployed as new forms of repression.
  • not all blogs are revolutionary. China, Iran, and Russia all have bloggers who are more authoritarian in their views than their governments are. Some of these governments are even beginning to follow the path laid by Western corporations, actively deploying regime-friendly bloggers to spread talking points. Is this “samizdat”? Cold War baggage, in short, severely limits the imagination of do-gooders in the West. They assume that the Internet is too big to control without significant economic losses. But governments don’t need to control every text message or email. There’s a special irony when Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggests—as he did in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last November—that China’s government will find it impossible to censor “a billion phones that are trying to express themselves.” Schmidt is rich because his company sells precisely targeted ads against hundreds of millions of search requests per day. If Google can zero in like that, so can China’s censors.
  • modern authoritarian governments control the web in ways more sophisticated than guard towers
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Superpowers like China have to engage with the global economy. So for them, the best censorship system is the one that censors the least. Millions of people already disclose intimate social data on Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, and their Russian and Chinese alternatives—and that’s all the data governments need to pick the right target. Online friends with an antigovernment blogger? No access for you! Spend most of your day surfing Yahoo Finance? Browse whatever you want. Satisfied Chinese investment bankers will have access to an uncensored web; subversive democracy activists get added to the government watch list.
Ed Webb

Global Voices Gathers Information From Citizens All Over the Globe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...14voices.html

socialmedia media journalism bloggers censorship advocacy

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • “Our job is to curate the conversation that is happening all over the Internet with people who really understand what is going on,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a former Tokyo bureau chief for CNN who founded Global Voices with Ethan Zuckerman, a technologist and Africa expert, while they were fellows at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “We amplify, contextualize and translate what these conversations are and why they are relevant.”
  • “We don’t parachute in. We are there all the time. “
  • Mr. Sigal said that having editors work with volunteer bloggers brought traditional journalistic values to the operation, like checking facts and sources. “But it is less about a finished story and more about a conversation,” he said. “When we build a story, we include links back to the original sources, so you can follow the story as far down as you want to. We want you to leave our site and go find the original, find more.”
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  • “It turns out that it is much more critical than they had imagined because the other international news sources are being dismantled.”
  • 18-hour days for Ms. Hussaini, whose work is now followed closely on the site and on Twitter by journalists from traditional media organizations, including Andy Carvin of NPR, who has been regularly curating and publishing posts on Twitter, creating a news wire about the unrest in the region for weeks.
  • “The citizen media scene is small in Libya,” Ms. Hussaini said. “We find it very difficult to find voices here and in other places where there is a lot of censorship and a lot of fear from the regime. Bloggers being arrested is a fact of life in some countries.”
  • Global Voices Advocacy is run by Sami Ben Gharbia, a highly respected blogger who is a founder of Nawaat, a blog about Tunisia, and an activist who until recently lived in exile from Tunisia for 13 years.
  • “People are not always interested in knowing what is happening in Yemen,” he said. “We have been waiting for people to pay attention to this corner of the world for a long time, and now we are ready to tell their stories.”
Ed Webb

ONI Releases 2009 Middle East & North Africa Research | OpenNet Initiative - 0 views

opennet.net/...dle-east-north-africa-research

opennet censorship middle_east middleeast news analysis internet socialnetworking

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Aug 09 - Cached
  • While not all countries in the Middle East and North Africa filter the Internet, censorship across the region is on the rise, and the scope and depth of filtering are increasing. Testing has revealed political filtering to be the common denominator across the region; however, social filtering is on the rise.
  • Based on ONI testing results, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and the West Bank do not currently filter any material; however, none of those are without regulations.
  • Bahrain, Iran, Syria and Tunisia have the strictest political filtering practices in the region.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Although increased filtering is the rule and unblocking the exception, there are a few instances of the latter since our last report. Syria has restored access to Arabic-language Wikipedia, Morocco has lifted a ban on a number of pro-Western Sahara independence Web sites, and Libya has begun to allow access to previously banned political sites. Additionally, Sudanese filtering of sites containing LGBT, dating, and health-related content has lessened since the last round of ONI testing.
  • Iran is among the strictest filtering regimes in the world, pervasively filtering political and social content, as well as Internet tools and proxies, and substantially filtering content related to conflict and security.
  • In the Middle East and North Africa, the filtering of social media and social networking sites has become relatively commonplace. For example, YouTube and Facebook are currently filtered Syria and Tunisia, and Orkut and Flickr are blocked in Iran and the UAE. Iran also filters a local social networking site, Balatarin.com, and the UAE and Saudi Arabia filter certain YouTube videos, though not the entire site.
  • Blocking Web sites in a local language is approximately twice as likely as blocking sites only available in English or other international languages.
Ed Webb

Search Engine Helps Users Connect In Arabic : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...story.php

Arabic internet online language transliteration typing

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Jul 09 - Cached
  • new technology that is revolutionizing the way Arabic-speaking people use the Internet
  • Abdullah says that of her 500 Egyptian students, 78 percent have never typed in Arabic online, a fact that greatly disturbed Habib Haddad, a Boston-based software engineer originally from Lebanon. "I mean imagine [if] 78 percent of French people don't type French," Haddad says. "Imagine how destructive that is online."
  • "The idea is, if you don't have an Arabic keyboard, you can type Arabic by spelling your words out phonetically," Jureidini says. "For example ... when you're writing the word 'falafel,' Yamli will convert that to Arabic in your Web browser. We will go and search not only the Arabic script version of that search query, but also for all the Western variations of that keyword."
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  • At a recent "new" technology forum at MIT, Yamli went on to win best of show — a development that did not escape the attention of Google, which recently developed its own search and transliteration engine. "I guess Google recognizes a good idea when it sees it," Jureidini says. He adds, "And the way we counter it is by being better. We live and breathe Yamli every day, and we're constantly in the process of improving how people can use it." Experts in Arabic Web content say that since its release a year ago, Yamli has helped increase Arabic content on the Internet just by its use. They say that bodes well for the Arabic Web and for communication between the Arab and Western worlds.
  • Ed Webb on 16 Jul 09
     
    One of our themes was language - how the domination of the web by English might affect who uses it and how.
Ed Webb

Should we support internet activists in the Middle East? | Marc Lynch - 0 views

lynch.foreignpolicy.com/...t_activists_in_the_middle_east

egypt blog bloggers blogging rights repression Jordan aid USA Lynch

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Apr 09 - No Cached
  • In many ways it was a pessimistic talk, which pushed back against expectations that new media technologies like blogs, Facebook or Twitter were going to radically change politics in the short or medium term.  Over the longer term, there is a more real transformative potential, especially for the individuals who use the technologies.  But analysts need to not be confused by the bright sparkling lights of fancy new technology or assume that it will have effects independently of the real lines of power and politics. 
  • politics come first, and that technology alone can have only a very limited impact in the face of authoritarian states.  Where internet activists have had a significant impact in Arab countries, it has usually been tied to distinct political opportunities – such as the Kwuaiti royal transition or elections --- or else led by people who were activists first and used technology as a tool.  New media did help activists in Egypt, Bahrain and elsewhere to punch well above their weight for a while... but eventually the regimes caught up and the real balance of power showed. 
  • I have a hard time thinking of a communications technology more poorly suited for organizing high-risk political collective action than Facebook. 
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  • Neither the United States as a government nor civil society-based supporters of the activists have been able to do much to help them when they run afoul of the authorities.  And the more that they are encouraged to develop political strategies, the more likely they are to run into such problems.  We often have a habit of issuing bad checks to these people, egging them on and encouraging them to take risky actions but then failing to effectively protect them.  If the Facebook groups had actually managed to get people out into the streets earlier this month, what were their fans in the West prepared to do when the police started beating them up and getting them fired from their jobs or expelled from school?  Not much.  If citizen journalists expose corruption in a local government office, who is going to protect them when they are sued for libel or beaten up for their efforts… keeping in mind that they enjoy no legal protections whatsoever as ‘citizen journalists’.
  • the point should be to create the kind of legal and political environments in which internet activists – and all citizens – can operate without fearing the worst consequences, rather than encouraging them to take such risks without any protection.  But I throw this out for discussion.  What do we owe the activists who we encourage?  What is the best way of paying that debt? 
  • Ed Webb on 24 Apr 09
     
    Some important questions for us to ponder as the semester winds to a close.
Ed Webb

Op-Ed Columnist - Tear Down This Cyberwall! - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...18kristof.html

kristof Iran twitter censorship opinion USA

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Jun 09 - Cached
  • The push to remove witnesses may be the prelude to a Tehran Tiananmen. Yet a secret Internet lifeline remains, and it’s a tribute to the crazy, globalized world we live in. The lifeline was designed by Chinese computer engineers in America to evade Communist Party censorship of a repressed Chinese spiritual group, the Falun Gong.Today, it is these Chinese supporters of Falun Gong who are the best hope for Iranians trying to reach blocked sites.“We don’t have the heart to cut off the Iranians,” said Shiyu Zhou, a computer scientist and leader in the Chinese effort, called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. “But if our servers overload too much, we may have to cut down the traffic.”
  • China is fighting back against the “hacktivists.” The government has announced that new computers sold beginning next month will have to have Internet filtering software, called Green Dam (the consortium has already developed software called Green Tsunami to neutralize it). More alarming, in 2006 a consortium engineer living outside Atlanta was attacked in his home, beaten up and his computers stolen. The engineers behind Freegate are now careful not to disclose their physical locations.
  • bullets usually trump tweets
Ed Webb

The Making of a YouTube Radical - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...youtube-radical.html

US USA technology youtube radicalization nazis alt-right socialmedia

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Mr. Cain, 26, recently swore off the alt-right nearly five years after discovering it, and has become a vocal critic of the movement. He is scarred by his experience of being radicalized by what he calls a “decentralized cult” of far-right YouTube personalities, who convinced him that Western civilization was under threat from Muslim immigrants and cultural Marxists, that innate I.Q. differences explained racial disparities, and that feminism was a dangerous ideology.
  • Over years of reporting on internet culture, I’ve heard countless versions of Mr. Cain’s story: an aimless young man — usually white, frequently interested in video games — visits YouTube looking for direction or distraction and is seduced by a community of far-right creators. Some young men discover far-right videos by accident, while others seek them out. Some travel all the way to neo-Nazism, while others stop at milder forms of bigotry.
  • YouTube and its recommendation algorithm, the software that determines which videos appear on users’ home pages and inside the “Up Next” sidebar next to a video that is playing. The algorithm is responsible for more than 70 percent of all time spent on the site
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • YouTube has inadvertently created a dangerous on-ramp to extremism by combining two things: a business model that rewards provocative videos with exposure and advertising dollars, and an algorithm that guides users down personalized paths meant to keep them glued to their screens
  • “If I’m YouTube and I want you to watch more, I’m always going to steer you toward Crazytown.”
  • 94 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 use YouTube, a higher percentage than for any other online service
  • YouTube has been a godsend for hyper-partisans on all sides. It has allowed them to bypass traditional gatekeepers and broadcast their views to mainstream audiences, and has helped once-obscure commentators build lucrative media businesses
  • Bellingcat, an investigative news site, analyzed messages from far-right chat rooms and found that YouTube was cited as the most frequent cause of members’ “red-pilling” — an internet slang term for converting to far-right beliefs
  • The internet was an escape. Mr. Cain grew up in postindustrial Appalachia and was raised by his conservative Christian grandparents. He was smart, but shy and socially awkward, and he carved out an identity during high school as a countercultural punk. He went to community college, but dropped out after three semesters. Broke and depressed, he resolved to get his act together. He began looking for help in the same place he looked for everything: YouTube.
  • they rallied around issues like free speech and antifeminism, portraying themselves as truth-telling rebels doing battle against humorless “social justice warriors.” Their videos felt like episodes in a long-running soap opera, with a constant stream of new heroes and villains. To Mr. Cain, all of this felt like forbidden knowledge — as if, just by watching some YouTube videos, he had been let into an exclusive club. “When I found this stuff, I felt like I was chasing uncomfortable truths,” he told me. “I felt like it was giving me power and respect and authority.”
  • YouTube’s executives announced that the recommendation algorithm would give more weight to watch time, rather than views. That way, creators would be encouraged to make videos that users would finish, users would be more satisfied and YouTube would be able to show them more ads.
  • A month after its algorithm tweak, YouTube changed its rules to allow all video creators to run ads alongside their videos and earn a portion of the revenue they generated.
  • the bulk of his media diet came from far-right channels. And after the election, he began exploring a part of YouTube with a darker, more radical group of creators. These people didn’t couch their racist and anti-Semitic views in sarcastic memes, and they didn’t speak in dog whistles. One channel run by Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, posted videos with titles like “‘Refugee’ Invasion Is European Suicide.” Others posted clips of interviews with white supremacists like Richard Spencer and David Duke.
  • Several current and former YouTube employees, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, said company leaders were obsessed with increasing engagement during those years. The executives, the people said, rarely considered whether the company’s algorithms were fueling the spread of extreme and hateful political content.
  • Google Brain’s researchers wondered if they could keep YouTube users engaged for longer by steering them into different parts of YouTube, rather than feeding their existing interests. And they began testing a new algorithm that incorporated a different type of A.I., called reinforcement learning. The new A.I., known as Reinforce, was a kind of long-term addiction machine. It was designed to maximize users’ engagement over time by predicting which recommendations would expand their tastes and get them to watch not just one more video but many more.
  • YouTube’s recommendations system is not set in stone. The company makes many small changes every year, and has already introduced a version of its algorithm that is switched on after major news events to promote videos from “authoritative sources” over conspiracy theories and partisan content. This past week, the company announced that it would expand that approach, so that a person who had watched a series of conspiracy theory videos would be nudged toward videos from more authoritative news sources. It also said that a January change to its algorithm to reduce the spread of so-called “borderline” videos had resulted in significantly less traffic to those videos.
  • Many right-wing creators already made long video essays, or posted video versions of their podcasts. Their inflammatory messages were more engaging than milder fare. And now that they could earn money from their videos, they had a financial incentive to churn out as much material as possible.
  • As Mr. Molyneux promoted white nationalists, his YouTube channel kept growing. He now has more than 900,000 subscribers, and his videos have been watched nearly 300 million times. Last year, he and Ms. Southern — Mr. Cain’s “fashy bae” — went on a joint speaking tour in Australia and New Zealand, where they criticized Islam and discussed what they saw as the dangers of nonwhite immigration. In March, after a white nationalist gunman killed 50 Muslims in a pair of mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Mr. Molyneux and Ms. Southern distanced themselves from the violence, calling the killer a left-wing “eco-terrorist” and saying that linking the shooting to far-right speech was “utter insanity.” Neither Mr. Molyneux nor Ms. Southern replied to a request for comment. The day after my request, Mr. Molyneux uploaded a video titled “An Open Letter to Corporate Reporters,” in which he denied promoting hatred or violence and said labeling him an extremist was “just a way of slandering ideas without having to engage with the content of those ideas.”
  • Unlike most progressives Mr. Cain had seen take on the right, Mr. Bonnell and Ms. Wynn were funny and engaging. They spoke the native language of YouTube, and they didn’t get outraged by far-right ideas. Instead, they rolled their eyes at them, and made them seem shallow and unsophisticated.
  • “I noticed that right-wing people were taking these old-fashioned, knee-jerk, reactionary politics and packing them as edgy punk rock,” Ms. Wynn told me. “One of my goals was to take the excitement out of it.”
  • Ms. Wynn and Mr. Bonnell are part of a new group of YouTubers who are trying to build a counterweight to YouTube’s far-right flank. This group calls itself BreadTube, a reference to the left-wing anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s 1892 book, “The Conquest of Bread.” It also includes people like Oliver Thorn, a British philosopher who hosts the channel PhilosophyTube, where he posts videos about topics like transphobia, racism and Marxist economics.
  • The core of BreadTube’s strategy is a kind of algorithmic hijacking. By talking about many of the same topics that far-right creators do — and, in some cases, by responding directly to their videos — left-wing YouTubers are able to get their videos recommended to the same audience.
  • What is most surprising about Mr. Cain’s new life, on the surface, is how similar it feels to his old one. He still watches dozens of YouTube videos every day and hangs on the words of his favorite creators. It is still difficult, at times, to tell where the YouTube algorithm stops and his personality begins.
  • It’s possible that vulnerable young men like Mr. Cain will drift away from radical groups as they grow up and find stability elsewhere. It’s also possible that this kind of whiplash polarization is here to stay as political factions gain and lose traction online.
  • I’ve learned now that you can’t go to YouTube and think that you’re getting some kind of education, because you’re not.
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