Politics/Technology article by Shuvra Mahmud.
By adapting established methods of control, authoritarian and semi-authoritarian states have been able to counter the political impact of the internet within their borders, experts say, with serious implications for digital democracy movements around the world.
Despite global enthusiasm for the idea of digital revolutions, some state authorities have manipulated the flexible architecture of internet technology and even guided some of its development in order to promote their own interests and retain the monopoly of power.
A false dawn for digital revolutions
Since the early 21st Century, world leaders have lauded the ubiquitous and liberal nature of the internet, and ambitiously proclaimed that the information revolution would inevitably lead to the rise of liberal democracies.
Although there have been no historically positive cases where the transition from authoritarian rule has been significantly affected by the internet, media reports have hailed several cases where dissidents have adapted new social media and mobile phones to organize protests and circumvent censorship.
Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University and contributing editor to Foreign Policy magazine Evgeny Morozov, in a presentation at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference in July 2009, said that "much like fax machines in the 1980s, blogs and social networks have radically transformed the economies of protest."
Co-founder of Global Voices Online and Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong Rebecca MacKinnon, at a seminar at the Oxford Internet Institute on 24 November 2009, agreed with Morozov's sentiments.
But, she also highlighted a rise in cyber sleuths and vigilantes, who have used technology to expose corruption and transgressions by state officials, citing China as a prime example.
In Belarus, cyber dissidents organized flash-mob protests in March 2006 against what Condoleezza Rice called the "last outpost of tyranny in Europe" through email, social networks and mobile phones.
Similarly, many other examples have been cited as positive examples where the internet has been able to spread liberal and democratic values, including: The popularity of mobile text messages (SMS) in the Philippines; Egyptian activists' use of tools and services to circumvent state monitoring by intelligence agencies; Cubans' use of online discussion forums; the "Twitter revolution" in Iran; efforts by activists in China to circumvent filtering and censorship of information; and more.
These examples may indicate that a shift in power has taken place from the state monopoly of control over the media towards technologically savvy individuals. But to what extent can we say whether governments have shifted from an authoritarian system to a democratic one?
Morozov and MacKinnon both argue that government policies, not regimes, have shifted towards a middle ground, where the media and other media elements are used to control and set the news agenda, and to ultimately channel public opinion. The ubiquity of the internet has been matched by a growth in different levels of restrictions on free speech.
"Authoritarian deliberation"
Academics have said that on discovering like-minded people and seeing that their protests are not being stifled through violence, people will be more likely to join causes in what Professor Susanne Lohmann of UCLA in 1994 termed "information cascades".
In his speech to the TED, Morozov highlighted that not only do information cascades fail to translate into crowds, but certain authoritarian states themselves have "mastered the internet for propaganda purposes".
Blog postings tend to linger on in the internet and can spread almost immediately, indicating that censorship may not be as effective as some human rights watchdogs think. In fact, some Chinese language blogging platforms apply such a sweeping filtering system that even positive postings that contain the president's name, for example, are censored.
Assistant-Professor at UNC-Charlotte Jiang Min, in a paper published in June 2008, argued that it was possible to apply the principles of "public deliberation" to policy within an authoritarian or semi-authoritarian state, terming is "authoritarian deliberation".
Part of that deliberative process is to engage with the masses in their preferred medium of communication, Jiang said.
Moulding public opinion
In China, the state has employed a top-down policy designed to "channel public opinion". The principles of rapid news agenda setting and information manipulation have emerging as a centralized strategy aimed at tackling domestic and international information challenges in an internet era, and are sustained by strong domestic media controls.
As a part of this strategy, the authorities pay the so-called "50 Cent Party/Army", which comprise of some 28,000 bloggers posting and commenting on topical issues with statements supporting the state and its activities. Chinese officials have also been encouraged to actively engage - even use - "netizens", those who are actively involved in online communities.
In Russia, according to the Moscow Times on 29 October 2009, the Russian Communications and Press Ministry said that it was "looking for a company to provide the technology needed to allow bureaucrats to promote state interests on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook."
Media spin has been seeded out in Russia to private companies such as New Media Stars, owned by one of the Russia's youngest Duma members Konstantin Rykov. New Media Stars has produced zaputina.ru ("For Putin"), russia.ru (a leading Russian internet service) and vz.ru (a popular internet newspaper) - which all relay a pro-Kremlin line to Russian netizens.
The Kremlin has also increased its online-only media budget by 75 per cent in 2009.
The Israeli government and state institutions have been one of the early adopters of social media as a tool to take its message directly to a global audience.
Some 150,000 dollars have been allocated from the Israeli foreign ministry's budget this year towards an "internet warfare team" aimed at "establishing a special undercover team of paid workers whose job it will be to surf the internet 24 hours a day spreading positive news about Israel"; according to Jonathan Cook writing in the UAE-based The National newspaper website on 21 July 2009.
Ha'aretz on 29 January 2009 reported that President Shim'on Peres urging a group of students from 60 countries to "fight anti-Semitism using social networks like Facebook".
On 29 December 2008, several news agencies reported that the Israeli Defence Force had become the first national armed force to launch its own channel on YouTube as part of its public relations campaign to draw international support for its military operation in the Gaza Strip.
In Iran, according to Hamid Tehrani, writing in the US-based Berkman Centre for Internet and Society's "Internet and Democracy Blog" in January 2009, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have started Shi'i blogs and plan to recruit some 10,000 Basij bloggers for the same purposes.
Intelligence gathering
As well as "authoritarian deliberation", which attempts to control spin and neutralize online discussion before it translates into a real life civil movement, another reason for the state to maintain control of the internet has been the ability to gather intelligence.
In an article published on the human rights blog, OpenDemocracy.org, Professor of Iranian and Islamic studies at the University of California Babak Rahimi, wrote that during the Iranian presidential elections, and despite the levels of censorship of the media and jailed journalists and bloggers, the Iranian government also encouraged young people to go online.
"By unblocking Facebook and creating a false sense of open and fair elections, the intelligence services are able to monitor the activities of dissidents who may feel more comfortable to express their views on Facebook," he wrote.
In his article, Rahimi added that through such small concessions to liberty "the regime also hopes to gain approval for its 'progressive' nature", and provide for itself a cover of legitimacy and proclaim its liberal values.
Morozov agrees that "authoritarian deliberation" can aid a state to gather information, data, identify weak spots or issues that are contentious, and act to neutralize any threats.
China planned in July 2009 to introduce the controversial Green Dam internet filtering system, which the state said would protect young people and curb access to pornography. But the project came under fire from human rights watchdogs which claimed the software would collect user data and censor content beyond its remit.
Lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan opposed the software at the time. On 2 July, he told journalists: "If [the authorities] really want to protect young people from porn, they should deal with the source – pornographic websites."
Factors beyond technology
New communications mediums can provide a space outside of government propaganda in which more information is available and new technology can provide easier ways of circumventing censorship, and make crackdowns less violent - as the police can be surrounded by mobile phones capturing stills and videos.
However, as well as these possibilities, "rational ignorance" also exists in the form of political apathy, the love for celebrity, gossip and pornography, which can create a form of "cyber-hedonism" in the best case scenarios, and more sinister uses of the internet in the worst, such as: Cyber-terrorism, cyber-espionage, and cyber-warfare.
Indeed, online participation does not always equate to online political participation.
A paper by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published in 2003 said that "the barriers to greater online citizen engagement in policy-making are cultural, organizational and constitutional, not technological."
However, MacKinnon and others have hope in technology. She said that a "transparent internet can lead to greater democracy...The possibility is there."
USEFUL WEBSITES
- Rebecca MacKinnon
- Evgeny Morozov
http://wanabehuman.blogspot.com
