Antony Loewenstein

Profit from despotism

Antony Loewenstein — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:53:05 +0000

Who said there isn’t money to made in the West from Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe?

The dangers of blogging for democracy

Antony Loewenstein — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:11:08 +0000

My following article appeared in yesterday’s edition of Crikey:

64 people have been arrested for blogging their views since 2003, according to a recent University of Washington report. Three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues in 2007 than the year before. More than half of all the arrests since 2003 were made in China, Egypt and Iran. Internet censorship has become a key global concern.

These issues — and more – were discussed at the recent Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008, held in Budapest. The aim of the two-day event, sponsored in part by Harvard University and Google, was to bring 200 writers, dissidents, bloggers, human rights activists and citizen journalists from across the world to discuss the role of Western multinationals in web filtering — and how bloggers are increasingly challenging the narrow focus of the mainstream media and creating alternative, online spaces for minorities (in, say, Bolivia and Syria) to transmit their messages to the world.

Representatives from various countries, including Madagascar, Venezuela, Kenya, China and Egypt, gave the event a wonderfully diverse flavour but common themes emerged. Everybody wants to be heard. And using YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, FeedBurner, blogs, mobile phones, Facebook and LiveMotion in countries such as Pakistan, Armenia, Belarus and Singapore is one way to circumvent the authoritarian impulse of often US-backed dictatorships.

It was constantly stressed that the internet can’t bring real democratic reform on its own but the web has become an invaluable organising tool to generate political change. Of course, some bloggers just want to write about food, fashion and fast cars.

One session, “The Wired Electorate in Emerging Democracies”, featured Iranian-exile Hamid Tehrani (whose report on the country’s anti-Semitic bloggers offers a sobering perspective on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s pernicious influence). Tehrani argued that Iran’s reformist bloggers, often seen in the West as moderates, have become relatively unpopular and disorganised. They are “serial losers” who are unlikely to regain power any time soon.

Armenian journalist Onnik Krikorian in his country saw the use of YouTube to highlight irregularities such as vote stuffing which forced the regime to defend its actions to the world. Activists also posted YouTube footage of police shooting demonstrators.

Another session, “When Biases Meet Biases”, discussed the ways in which the troubles over Tibet and the Beijing Games have left Chinese netizens and Western audiences more distant than ever. Leading US-based dissident Xiao Qiang said that the internet, rather than finding rational voices over sensitive issues, actually pushed ideologies and opinions to extremes. Calls were made for greater understanding of opposing positions. For example, are most Chinese really opposed to Tibetan self-determination, or are only the loudest nationalists being heard?

Antony Loewenstein was invited to present a paper on the importance of NGOs in assisting on-the-ground activists, the proposed Rudd-government plan to censor the web and his work with Amnesty International Australia on its Uncensor campaign about internet repression in China in this Olympic year. His speech can be found here.

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Battle of the Brainwashed

Antony Loewenstein — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:57:46 +0000

My latest New Matilda column is about the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest last week:

Are Chinese netizens any more thin-skinned than Westerners when attacked online for their opinions? Antony Loewenstein reports from the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit

During the Harvard University sponsored Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 in Budapest last week, attended by around 200 bloggers, human rights activists, writers, journalists and IT geeks from every corner of the globe, one participant joked that it was worthwhile buying domain names for dissidents likely to be soon imprisoned. “Just get them with ‘Free (insert name here).com’,” he said.

A University of Washington report this year found that 64 people have been arrested for blogging their political views since 2003. Three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues in 2007 than in 2006. More than half of the arrests since 2003 were made in China, Iran and Egypt. Internet censorship has become a concern of global significance.

I was invited to present a paper at the two-day event (see here) that covered the research for my forthcoming book, The Blogging Revolution, on the internet in repressive regimes, how Western multinationals are increasingly colluding with authoritarian governments, plans by the Rudd Government to institute filtering against child pornography and violence, and my work with Amnesty on its Uncensor campaign on Chinese censorship.

Initiated in 2004, Global Voices’s brief is to provide insights into non-Western nations, through country-specific blogs, to Western audiences. Recent years have seen it expand to include a translation service for multiple languages, support for minorities in developing nations (the Rising Voices project) and Voices without Votes, the chance for global citizens to comment on the 2008 US Presidential election campaign.

The Budapest summit featured bloggers and activists from places as diverse as Madagascar, India, Belarus, Kenya, Pakistan, Singapore, Armenia, Egypt, Iran and China. Although the internet can’t bring democratic reform on its own - and it was constantly stressed that only citizens of a particular country should have the right to determine a political system, not outside forces - it is gradually allowing on-the-ground organisations to challenge corruption, fraudulent elections and police-led torture.

Although the people I met came from varied backgrounds, from the elites to indigenous communities using new technology to find a voice in a country like Bolivia, the sense of community was palpable. After all, what can an Australian journalist like myself really understand about democratic struggles in Iran and Bangladesh? By sharing stories, it soon became clear that many speakers related to others on the opposite side of the globe. Tools such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, email, FeedBurner and text messaging were common denominators by a minority online community challenging state-run media lies.

Numerous sessions revealed insights into societies all too easily categorised as oppressive. Iranian exile Hamid Tehrani revealed that the regime, now with one of the most effective web filtering systems outside of China, bans many anti-George W Bush sites such as Juan Cole and Huffington Post but allows a neo-con and pro-war site such as Pajamas Media to remain uncensored.

A number of prominent Kenyan bloggers, including Ory Okolloh and Daudi Were, discussed the role of new technology in the aftermath of the stolen election in late 2007. With only 7-10 per cent internet penetration in the country, bloggers woke up early on election day to film people waiting patiently in line to vote. Some were even embedded with foreign observers and could immediately report, via SMS and Twitter, irregularities in the counting process. International support in the diaspora was crucial to highlight the relatively stable nation outside of Africa.

Blogger Luis Carlos Diaz, from Venezuela, debunked many of the Western myths about President Hugo Chavez. “The problem is we have too much petroleum,” Diaz lamented.

Although critical of many of his policies, Diaz said that Chavez was a democratically elected leader who wasn’t quashing freedom of speech. “Voting is a sport in Venezuela,” he said. To relieve the boredom of Chavez’s weekly eight-hour diatribes on state television, bloggers were providing an alternative perspective on issues that matter to average citizens, such as poverty, housing and education. Diaz said he’d recently spoken to workers whose job is to transcribe Chavez’s speeches. They usually run for around 3000 pages every week.

Unsurprisingly, China featured prominently in the sessions. Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN journalist and now academic in Hong Kong, stressed that the debate had to progress past the question of “who is more brainwashed?” - Western or Chinese audiences. One of the key translators of Chinese blog posts for Global Voices, John Kennedy, challenged his audience by asking whether the growing Western anger against the Chinese people was justified. Was nationalism as great an influence as claimed? Was self-determination for Tibet so unacceptable in the motherland? Are Chinese netizens any more thin-skinned than Westerners when attacked online for their opinions?

Despite these valid questions, one of China’s leading dissidents, Isaac Mao, wished that the Chinese mob mentality online on issues of national importance wasn’t so strong. He stressed that although the concept of freedom of speech is paramount in the West, many other societies place greater emphasis on the rule of law and fighting corruption.

Mao, who launched Digital Nomads to host hundreds of independent blogs away from prying authoritarian rule, feared that citizens in prosperous, Western countries rarely understood the “crimes of omission” in their own societies. “They don’t get why the non-Western world wants to talk about issues that the Western largely ignores,” Mao said, “such as poverty and environmental degradation.”

The role of blogs in China is therefore more than simply reacting to perceived Western slights. Many netizens may not be calling for the dissolution of the Communist Party or planning a revolution, but they’re given far more freedoms today than five years ago. Mirroring what I found during my research in China last year, very few Chinese bloggers appear upset with the excessive filtering regime.

A Western translator living in Japan, Chris Salzberg, posed one of the more provocative questions of the summit. During the recent mass-stabbing incident in Tokyo, two passers-by started filming the event, transmitting live murder around the web (discussion here and here). Only a few thousand viewers saw the video, but should such images be allowed broadcast? Should there be any limits on material posted on the internet? Japan, like Australia, is currently debating placing restrictions on online content and indicates a Western trend towards governmental regulations over the medium.

It was encouraging to hear from IT insiders that many employees of companies such as Google and Yahoo feel distinctly uncomfortable with the role their companies play in a countries such as China and regularly leak material about its actions anonymously and develop tools to allow an email program such as Gmail to be used securely, away from the prying eyes of censorious regimes.

The Budapest conference indicated yet again that the mainstream media remains woefully under-prepared and unwilling to provide coverage of vast swathes of the world. Blogging and citizen journalism therefore provides an essential alternative to the daily obsession in much of our media with reprinting government and corporate spin as news.

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Personality disorder in Iran

Antony Loewenstein — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:07:21 +0000

The positive:

Iranian Minister of Telecommunications and Information Technology Mohammad Soleimani said on Tuesday that there are as many as 63 million fixed and mobile phone users in Iran.

Addressing the Fourth International Seminar on Information and Telecommunications Security in Damascus, Soleimani said 27 percent of Iranian population are linked to internet.

Soleimani said 53 percent of Iranian villages are now connected to internet now.

The negative:

Iran’s parliament is set to debate a draft bill which could see the death penalty used for those deemed to promote corruption, prostitution and apostasy on the Internet, reports said on Wednesday.

MPs on Wednesday voted to discuss as a priority the draft bill which seeks to “toughen punishment for harming mental security in society,” the ISNA news agency said.

The text lists a wide range of crimes such rape and armed robbery for which the death penalty is already applicable. The crime of apostasy (the act of leaving a religion, in this case Islam) is also already punishable by death.

However, the draft bill also includes “establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy”, which is a new addition to crimes punishable by death.

Those convicted of these crimes “should be punished as “mohareb’ (enemy of God) and “corrupt on the earth’,” the text says.

Under Iranian law the standard punishments for these two crimes are “hanging, amputation of the right hand and then the left foot as well as exile.”

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Don’t mention Vietnam

Antony Loewenstein — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:19:56 +0000

The American mainstream media displays typical, unrestrained mania over daring to challenge John McCain’s Vietnam record. God forbid somebody may question the Republican nominee:

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Redefining the democratic model

Antony Loewenstein — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:31:12 +0000

Evgeny Morozov, Open Democracy, June 30:

The Budapest [Global Voices] gathering represents one of the major benefits of today’s internet revolution: the radical democratisation of the global flow of ideas. The technology, the ideas and the processes that have made possible blogs, social networks, and collaborative projects like Wikipedia also give many unconventional thinkers previously consigned to the margins of public life a platform that enables them to be heard by a dedicated (if often tiny) audience. The academic, blogger and pundit Daniel W Drezner has called this new generation - free from the usual constraints of the academia, self-employed, and armed with Google search - “Public Intellectuals 2.0″.

But is it “Public Intellectuals 2.0” or “Dissidents 2.0″? The Budapest experience suggests that the movement slowly emerging on the margins of the blogosphere shares much in common with an older generation of those who sought to “speak truth to power”. The city’s mayor Gábor Demszky - a communist-era dissident - was one of the first people to welcome some Global Voices bloggers. The early stencils used to copy anti-government materials in east-central Europe, now housed in the Open Society archives in Budapest, add to the sense that there are similarities between blogging and samizdat. It may be just a matter of time before an Apple or a Lenovo laptop belonging to a Belarusian or an Uzbek dissident-blogger finds a well-deserved placed next to these stencils.

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Don’t worry about those blacks, really

Antony Loewenstein — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:23:19 +0000

Robert Mugabe is undoubtedly destroying Zimbabwe, but why does the West have such selective outrage when it comes to Africa?

(Hint: oil.)

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“Do you have love in your culture?”

Antony Loewenstein — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:12:00 +0000

This is how Israel treats Palestinian journalists who struggle to report on the indignity of the Zionist occupation of their land.

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The BBC on web repression

Antony Loewenstein — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:08:33 +0000

I connected with many activists and bloggers from around the world at last week’s Global Voices Citizen Summit 2008 in Budapest.

During the event, I was interviewed by the BBC Radio program, IPM, a weekly show about the web and technology. This story featured interviews with dissidents from various nations, telling their stories of using the web to challenge authoritarianism. I was asked about my research for the forthcoming book, The Blogging Revolution:

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China is not a one-sided story

Antony Loewenstein — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:22:46 +0000

My following article appears in the Amnesty International Australia’s Uncensor campaign about human rights in China:

Westerners must look at China in all its diversity, including voices of reason, writes Antony Loewenstein

During last week’s Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest, Hungary, where I presented a paper on the role of the internet in repressive regimes, there was much discussion about web issues in this Chinese Olympic year. The main conclusion was that the West fundamentally misunderstands the realities of the issue.

Take Isaac Mao, a leading blog pioneer in China. He didn’t deny the reality of major governmental filtering of sensitive material but questioned the response of Western elites to it. “We don’t have professional media in China”, Mao said. Propaganda is the name of the game, but the web is changing the rules.

CNN was accused of showing bias against the Chinese people during the Tibetan protests earlier in the year. A website, anti-CNN.com, was established to counter these perceived inaccuracies. Mao said that CNN, after the ferocious attacks, altered its coverage to better reflect the sensibilities of the Chinese people. Nobody knows if CNN was deliberately smearing China – Hong Kong academic Rebecca MacKinnon said that it might just have been the work of lowly interns at the station – but many speakers, including Mao, said that the West’s obsession with freedom of speech was often distorting our understanding of the situation.

Mao told the 200 activists, dissidents, human rights campaigners, bloggers and journalists from dozens of countries around the world, such as Kenya, Singapore, Iran, Yemen and Pakistan, that in many parts of the world the rule of law and ending corruption were far more important values.

John Kennedy, the leading translator of Chinese blog posts for Global Voices, said that it was important for Westerners to understand that the Chinese blogosphere wasn’t homogenous and displayed far more opinions than many thought. How much do we really know about general Chinese attitudes to Tibetan self-determination? Is the perception of Chinese netizens being thin-skinned really accurate and different to Westerners being attacked by another society and reacting accordingly?

While leading US-based dissident Xiao Qiang argued that the internet this year had played a key role in pushing ideologies and opinions to the extreme, Kennedy reminded us that many Chinese bloggers sided with the protesting Burmese monks in 2007. In other words, it all depends on who is pushing the authoritarianism.

Former CNN journalist Rebecca MacKinnon talked about a study conducted by Dave Lyons on his Mutant Palm blog. It shows how, compared to coverage of the 2004 Athens Games, “practically none of the sites that exist in China, written in English, are linked to or from the major English Olympics sites outside China. China may be coming out to the world this Olympics, but apparently their webpages haven’t.” We ignore Chinese voices at our peril.

Of course, with just over one month until the start of the Beijing Games, China continues to harass dissidents while imposing onerous visa restrictions on visitors. Most China experts at the Budapest conference told me that Beijing would now be expecting fairly negative global press coverage over the coming two months, considering the PR disasters in 2008.

We have to find new ways to better communicate with Chinese netizens and not ask, as MacKinnon said, “who is more brainwashed?” The emergence of websites with “alternative” versions of reality – the Chinese view and the Western-approved version – is a worrying development for a medium that should unite, rather than divide, people.

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