It is time to stop debating whether the Internet is an effective tool for political expression and instead to address the much more urgent question of how digital technology can be structured, governed, and used to maximize the good and minimize the evil.
It takes a strong stomach and a thick skin to be a female activist fighting online censorship in Pakistan.
The basic technical protocols that have enabled the Internet to work in such a globally interconnected way are developed and shared openly by a community of engineers.
The U.S. relationship with Bahrain is obviously more complicated than with Syria and Iran.
Whatever Tencent can see, the Chinese government can see.
The sovereigns of the Internet are acting like they have a divine right to govern.
WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Logs and U.S. diplomatic cables stolen from a classified network by an Army private.
Many of the Kuomintang elite in Taiwan have relatives among the ruling elite here on mainland China.
Citizens’ rights cannot be protected if their digital activities are governed and policed by opaque and publicly unaccountable corporate mechanisms.
If you want to have traction in China, you have to be in China.
It’s harder and harder for journalists to get out in the field and interview Iraqis. The Web can get these voices out easily and cheaply.
Like it or not, Google and the Chinese government are stuck in a tense, long-term relationship, and can look forward to more high-stakes shadow-boxing in the netherworld of the world’s most elaborate system of censorship.
Increasingly, corporate executives who don’t speak Japanese are coming into Japan. Unlike their predecessors, they expect their employees to be able to communicate in English.
As a citizen of a community, if you never vote or engage, don’t be surprised when the outcome doesn’t serve your interests; you’ve never done anything to push things in the right direction.
We willingly share personal information with companies for the convenience of using their products.
Almost every week, there are stories in the press or on Chinese social media about what even the official Chinese media call ‘hot online topics:’ stories about how people in a particular village or town used Weibo to expose malfeasance by local or regional authorities.
Taiwan politics certainly is colorful.
Without global human rights, labor and environmental movements, companies would still be hiring 12-year-olds as a matter of course and poisoning our groundwater without batting an eyelid.
I lived in China for 9 years straight. I saw how my Chinese friends benefited and gained much more freedom to determine the course of their lives, their jobs, their creative works, and their identities over the course of a decade. Much of this increased freedom is thanks to economic engagement by the West.
Every news organization needs a social media strategy.
Governments clash with each other over who should control the co-ordination of the Internet’s infrastructure and critical resources.
If China someday gains a more fair, just, and accountable system of government, it will be due to the hard work and efforts of the Chinese people, not due to the inexorable workings of any particular technology.
Whether it’s Baidu or Chinese versions of YouTube or Sina or Sohu, Chinese Internet sites are getting daily directives from the government telling them what kinds of content they cannot allow on their site and what they need to delete.
When U.S. commercial interests press the Chinese government to do a better job of policing Chinese websites for pirated content, a blind eye is generally turned to the fact that ensuing crackdowns provide a great excuse to tighten mechanisms to censor all content the Chinese government doesn’t like.
In the wake of the Internet getting shut down in Egypt – something that also happened in Xinjiang – I know that there are groups working on ways to help people get online when domestic networks get shut down. This could also be of use to some people in China.
Digital power is every bit as likely to be abused as physical power, but is often more insidious because it is often wielded in the background until its results manifest themselves in the offline world.
Speech within the kingdom of Amazonia – run by its sovereign Jeff Bezos and his board of directors with help from the wise counsel and judgment of the company’s executives – is not protected in the same way that speech is constitutionally protected in America’s public spaces.
The Chinese government clearly sees Internet and mobile innovation as a major driver of its global economic competitiveness going forward.
Sohu will protect you from yourself.
It’s a tough problem that a company faces once they branch out beyond one set of offices in California into that big bad world out there.
Facebook and Google are battling over who will be our gateway to the rest of the Internet through ‘like’ buttons and universal logins – giving them huge power over our online identities and activities.
Microsoft runs the world’s biggest blogging platform, MSN Spaces.
When Google went into China, there were some people who said they shouldn’t compromise at all – that it is very bad for human rights to do so. But there were other people, particularly Chinese people, who said they were glad Google had gone in.
So long as confusion reigns, there will be no successful global Internet agenda, only contradiction.
Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda.
Like Syria, the government of Bahrain employs aggressive tactics to censor and monitor its people’s online activity.
The relationship between citizens and government is increasingly mediated through the Internet.
Google attempted to run a search engine in China, and they ended up giving up.
The Egyptian Revolution makes it clear, if anybody was in doubt, that digital technologies are going to play a powerful role in the future of global politics.
For centuries, the Yangtze River – the longest in Asia – has played an important role in China’s history, culture, and economy. The Yangtze is as quintessentially Chinese as the Nile is Egyptian or the Rhine is German. Many businesses use its name.
Internet freedom is not possible without freedom from fear, and users will not be free from fear unless they are sufficiently protected from online theft and attack.
Governance is a way of organizing, amplifying, and constraining power.
In China’s big cities, American products – say, for instance, Proctor and Gamble shampoos or many other goods – are widely coveted by a lot of Chinese consumers.
The Patriot Act, passed overwhelmingly but hastily after 9/11, allows the FBI to obtain telecommunication, financial, and credit records without a court order.
In a pre-Internet world, sovereignty over our physical freedoms, or lack thereof, was controlled almost entirely by nation-states.
Anything illegal under Chinese law is, of course, not protected by copyright.
In the physical world, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a wanted man.
Digital activism did not spring immaculately out of Twitter and Facebook. It’s been going on ever since blogs existed.
The fact of the matter is that fewer people in Tokyo are able to do business in English than in many other big Asian cities, like Shanghai, Seoul or Bangkok.
I know plenty of people in China who don’t like what their government does to the Falun Gong, but they don’t want to entrust their data to the Falun Gong, either.
We have to start thinking of ourselves as citizens of the Internet, not just passive users. I don’t see how we can bring about change in our digital lives if we don’t take responsibility.
The Tunisian blogger and activist Sami Ben Gharbia has written passionately about how U.S. government involvement in grassroots digital spaces can endanger those who are already vulnerable to accusations by nasty regimes of acting as foreign agents.
The ‘Shawshank Redemption’ has nothing to do with China, but that hasn’t kept social media censors from blocking the movie’s title from searches on the country’s most popular Twitter-like microblogging service, Weibo.
Pretty much anybody who does creative work in China navigates the gray zone. People aren’t clear about where the line is any more, beyond which life gets really nasty and you become a dissident without having intended ever to be one.
Despite the Obama administration’s proclaimed commitment to global Internet freedom, the executive branch is not transparent about the types and capabilities of surveillance technologies it is sourcing and purchasing – or about what other governments are purchasing the same technology.
Human freedom increasingly depends on who controls what we know and, therefore, how we understand our world. It depends on what information we are able to create and disseminate: what we can share, how we can share it, and with whom we can share it.
Consistently, Baidu has censored politically sensitive search results much more thoroughly than Google.cn.
