Nusret ÖZGÜL
Bircan Ünver
redaksiyon
Nazmiye Halvaşi
halitumarWhen it’s the state that ultimately controls its access?
Does the internet enhance or detract from state power, especially when you consider that it’s the state that ultimately controls access to the internet? In turn, does social media politicize the once apolitical into new clusters of power?
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1) The sources of an authoritarian state’s legitimacy and control are complex – they depend on much more than the skillful blocking or manipulation of information.
2) Not all internet-based social mobilization is harmful to a state – it can spur those in power to address specific problems, thus helping bolster the state’s legitimacy rather than detracting from it.
3) Groups with the greatest ability to mobilize internet support might not necessarily be the ones that are able to mobilize mass support ‘on the ground’.
4) In the aggregate, manipulating the internet may be more effective than outright censorship. Indeed, authoritarian states can:
· Use ‘authoritarian deliberation’ to ‘spin’ the messages they would like to disseminate.
· Accrue open-source intelligence on activists and their foreign donors or supporters.
· Try and make the public share the blame for unpopular decisions (“we asked you”).
· Use or reach out to ‘harmless’ bloggers in order to demonstrate your ‘democratic’ credentials at home and abroad.
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“From Dictatorship to Democracy”
“In Nazi Germany there were no acquittals. To be arrested was to be convicted — more, it was to be dropped off the face of the earth, to be erased from memory. For if anyone dared to ask why, if any loved one inquired as to what charge was made, that person was next. By terror — culminating in the concentration and extermination camps — the people are made incommunicado — atomized — afraid to bare their thoughts to their closest friends.”
Though fully totalitarian regimes are extreme cases, the deliberate atomization of society through fear is a tactic common to all dictatorships. Because legitimacy is a mass phenomenon, credibly denying it to a hostile regime requires a ‘critical mass’ of people – and it generally requires them to appear together in public to make their case. This is exactly what atomization strives to make impossible. Its goal (through a variety of means) is to turn every individual in a society into an informant, and thereby preclude in advance any ‘dangerous’ exercise of popular power.
And this, Shirky claimed yesterday, is where technology can change things. If social media and other related technologies have the capacity to be politically transformative, it is because they make atomization infinitely more costly for authoritarian regimes. Indeed, one of the most striking things about Gene Sharp’s account of power (seemingly inspired by Hannah Arendt) is that it explains why social media is so politically significant. Atomization works not only by cutting individuals off from potentially like-minded others, but by preventing them from even believing that they are out there. Social media’s “many-to-many” communications model is therefore revolutionary from a strategic perspective because it makes the possibility of de-atomization real and obvious. Today, as never before, almost everyone knows that it is technologically possible to reach and communicate with almost everyone else.
As we write, From Dictatorship to Democracy is probably available on the internet in Syria. We also know from a recent documentary of a local Facebook group that studies it and possibly deploys some of Sharp’s tactics. Perhaps more importantly, however, Syrians know what social media is. They know – as all but a handful of the world’s people now know – that they should be able to reach and communicate their ideas with each other even if the Assad regime (or Mark Zuckerberg, one day) considers it too dangerous for them to do so. Because of social media power may become decentralized in the future – and that would represent true structural change in today’s international system.
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Allowing citizens access to the internet without ‘compromising’ the regime
China is perhaps the most celebrated example of a state today that actively seeks to limit its citizens’ access to the internet. It is about to invoke a new law, for example, that will require users of Sina Weibo, China’s most popular micro-blogging site, to register under their real names.
And yet, although it is easy to point an accusatory finger at repressive regimes, today’s presentation confirms that states with bona fide democratic credentials are just as guilty of internet censorship as the ‘usual suspects’. Our first map, for example, is based on data provided by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and identifies those states which engage in overt cyber-censorship. As so-called “Internet Enemies” the countries marked in red make up a familiar ‘who’s who’ of online censors – Myanmar, China, Iran, etc. Cyber-attacks to silence dissenting opinion, slowing down bandwidth during elections or simply cutting off access altogether are among the common tools of their trade.
When we turn, however, to RSF’s list of “Countries under Surveillance,” marked in yellow on the map, it is by no means made up of rogue or failed states and repressive regimes. Instead, it includes democratic nations such as Australia and France, which RSF accuses of subjecting their ‘netizens’ to targeted filtering and severely limiting their online freedom of speech. Additionally, RSF deems assorted “Countries under Surveillance” to be guilty of intimidating online journalists and bloggers with threats of violence and/or legal proceedings.
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China, Corporations and Internet Censorship
Control and manipulation of mass media outlets has been part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CPC) mandate for generations. However, the emergence of the internet and social media such as Facebook (not to mention micro-blogging sites like Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter) prompted a change in the CPC’s approach to monitoring and censoring media outlets – i.e., it decided to decentralize its traditional oversight of China’s mass media. But it was only after a number of ‘ mass incidents’ (the official term for civil unrest in China) that Beijing developed a strategic approach to protect CPC ideology in cyberspace.
Arguably the ‘mass incident’ that best reflects China’s new strategy for dealing with online unrest and social dissent is the 2008 Weng’an riot. The unrest occurred after a 16 year old girl was found dead in a river in Weng’ an County, Western China. Officials initially claimed that the girl had committed suicide. However, speculation that she was actually raped and murdered by two young men with ties to the local public security bureau prompted a mass rejection of the official explanation of events and led to widespread local unrest. Demonstrators eventually turned to social media outlets such as YouTube to disseminate updates on events across China, leaving the authorities with little chance or time to put a lid on the story.
As similar unrest continued to occur throughout China, the government eventually decided to block many leading Western social media websites.Facebook and Twitter, for example, have been blocked in China since riots broke out in Xinjiang province in 2009, while Google’s new social network, Google+, has been blocked since 2011. In the latter case, however, Google first cooperated with Beijing’s efforts to censor internet content. Its reasons for doing so, according to critics, were typical enough – it wanted to gain a significant foothold in one of the world’s fastest-growing online marketplaces. In fact, it was only in the wake of widespread criticism of Google’s complicity with state-censorship of the media that it eventually stopped censoring its content, before pulling out of China altogether in 2010.
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Crowdsourcing for Change?
Ushahidi’s Heather Leson discusses her organization’s use of crisis mapping techniques and outlines how non-state actors are increasingly collaborating online to tackle issues traditionally managed by governments.
Please note that you must have Adobe Flash Player installed to use the audio player.
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While it may seem fun and light-hearted, this kind of research is far from trivial: Detecting the moods expressed in millions of tweets requires serious computational algorithms able to do this task. These algorithms are called ‘sentiment classifiers’ and are the subject of recent research involving techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence. One such classifier I could mention is SentiStrength, developed by a British research group as part of the European CyberEmotions project.
Diffusion and Interaction
Another interesting area of research is investigating how information spreads on Twitter. Why do some tweets become popular while others drift into obscurity? In a recent paper, researchers at ETH Zurich (including myself) identified a criterion for the success of a tweet being re-tweeted: Our analyses showed that tweets in which words with high emotional contrast — such as ‘hate’ and ‘love’ — occur next to each other are up to four times more likely to be re-tweeted. Emotions and politics often go together, and Twitter research has also ventured into this domain.
Twitter users’ political interactions were addressed by Michael D Conover et al in their 2011 paper. The researchers were able to pinpoint clusters of users with opposing political convictions and then identify interaction patterns between the groups. The remarkable finding was that re-tweeting mostly took place within a certain political group, whereas there was rather heavy @mention-traffic between the two partisan groups. One possible explanation is that individuals included small pieces of content — in this case a mention of a user from the other political side — in order to spread their own opinions into the opposing group and to provoke an interaction: Users get alerts when they are mentioned in a post and hence will most likely read it. This finding seems to confirm other research contesting the reciprocity hypothesis (also known as the ‘echo chamber theory’, it suggests that people tend to only interact online with people holding similar opinions rather than engage with those of different political, religious or other persuasions).
Future responsibilities
It’s not only social networks that provide plenty of research opportunities – so do interactions between people and technology in general. Most prominently, the search volume of specific search terms in Google, as provided by Google Trends, has been shown to be useful in monitoring and predicting the outbreak of influenza epidemics. This kind of ‘data-driven science’ will become even more important in the future as the boundaries between off-line and on-line blur, especially with the transition to what has been termed the ‘Internet of things’.
Suggested Reading
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Internet Freedom: A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age |
Weibo and “Iron Curtain 2.0″ in China
This piece analyzes the political impact of the internet on Chinese state-society relations. In particular, it examines how government censors try to manipulate the use of the internet and Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter), while the latter’s users gamely try to gather information, exchange views, and organize protests against the government.
Internet in Iran: More Freedom in the Country?
Consistently ranked on the list of countries deemed “enemies of the internet,” Iran is one of the most dangerous places to be a blogger, given the extreme restrictions placed on online activities. The restrictions include draconian legislation, infrastructure limitations and garden variety arrests.
Democracy Promotion in the Age of Social Media: Risks and Opportunities
The prominent role played by social digital media in the popular uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East led to the dubious catchphrase “Social Media Revolution”. Critics of such nomenclature argue that Western policy-makers risk being hamstrung by any cyber-utopian views that suggest the internet is inherently pro-democratic.
The Access series includes three edited volumes, published by the OpenNet Initiative and MIT Press, which document nearly a decade’s worth of technical and in-field research on the trends and patterns shaping information controls around the world.
Who Controls the Internet: Illusions of a Borderless World
This 2006 book by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu assesses struggles to control the internet. The authors argue that the net’s destiny will inevitably reflect the interests of powerful states, and while it may help change some of the ways that states govern, it will not diminish the most fundamental roles of government any time soon.
Authoritarian Informationalism: China’s Approach to Internet Sovereignty
In light of the Google-China conflict, this article discusses the issue of internet sovereignty and, in particular, focuses on the various claims the Chinese government makes in order to assert its authority over this domain. This form of state sovereignty will continue to reflect an internet development and regulatory model – ‘authoritarian informationalism’ – that combines elements of capitalism, authoritarianism, and Confucianism.
Eğitim, Technology, Yeni Dünya Düzeni girildi
