RConversation

Surveillance technologies and "apolitical" corporations

There has been a steady stream of headlines recently about the use of Western surveillance technology by repressive regimes. After the hacktivist group Telecomix exposed the use by Syria of filtering and surveillance devices manufactured by the California-based company Blue Coat last month, the company has finally acknowledged that at least thirteen of its devices are being used by Syria.

Today, The Guardian has an amazing article titled "Governments turn to hacking techniques for surveillance of citizens." It describes the annual Intelligence Support Systems (ISS) World Americas  conference, at which surveillance firms share tips on the latest "lawful interception" techniques used to spy on citizens. The companies showed little concern for how this technology can be and is being abused around the world. An excerpt:

Jerry Lucas, the president of the company behind ISS World, TeleStrategies, does not deny surveillance developers that attend his conference supply to repressive regimes. In fact, he is adamant that the manufacturers of surveillance technology, such as Gamma International, SS8 and Hacking Team, should be allowed to sell to whoever they want.

"The surveillance that we display in our conferences, and discuss how to use, is available to any country in the world," he said. "Do some countries use this technology to suppress political statements? Yes, I would say that's probably fair to say. But who are the vendors to say that the technology is not being used for good as well as for what you would consider not so good?"

Would he be comfortable in the knowledge that regimes in Zimbabwe and North Korea were purchasing this technology from western companies? "That's just not my job to determine who's a bad country and who's a good country. That's not our business, we're not politicians … we're a for-profit company. Our business is bringing governments together who want to buy this technology."

The EFF has proposed a two-part "know your customer" framework for surveillance equipment:

1. Companies selling surveillance technologies to governments need to affirmatively investigate and "know your customer" before and during a sale.  We suggest something for human rights similar to what most of these companies are already required to do under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the export regulations for other purposes, and
2. Companies need to refrain from participating in transactions where their "know your customer" investigations reveal either objective evidence or credible concerns that the technologies provided by the company will be used to facilitate human rights violations.

Click here for further details. One of the broader problems, of course, is that the market for ever-more sophisticated surveillance equipment feeds unaccountable abuses of power not only by authoritarian regimes but also by democratic governments.

As long as engineers and companies claim to have no responsibility for the political context in which their inventions and products are used, the problem is going to grow worse. This problem has been exacerbated in the Internet age, but it has been around a lot longer. In a talk I gave last week at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference, I played a video clip from Tom Lehrer's early 1960's song about ex-Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun:

The lyrics :

Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown.
"Ha, Nazi Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.

Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.

You too may be a big hero,
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun

Kudos and Concerns for Google

Earlier this week, Google published an update of its Transparency Report, which among other things discloses the number of government requests received for user information as well as requests to remove content. The latest report contains more granular data than ever before, including the number of actual users targeted by the government requests. (China remains a black hole because releasing the data would break China's "state secrets" law and expose Chinese employees to prosecution.) As The Guardian points out, the data show a 70% increase in requests by the U.S. government or police. The company has also refused some takedown requests, including video of police brutality.  In the first half of 2011, Brazil topped the list with the most requests for content removal, followed by Germany, the U.S., and South Korea.

I argue in my book that inadequate transparency and accountability at the nexus between state and corporate power is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age. All Internet and telecommunications companies should be required to report regularly and systematically to the public on how content is policed, and under what circumstances it gets removed or blocked and at whose behest. All companies serious about building public credibility and trust should waste no time in following Google's lead.

Google still has a long way to go, however, when it comes to managing the development and rollout of its various services in a way that does not hurt its most vulnerable users. As I discuss in the book, implementation and enforcement of the real-name identity policy on Google Plus has thus far been a fiasco, resulting in dissidents and other vulnerable users around the world being booted from the service. Google's Senior VP of Social Vic Gundotra recently announced that the social network will "soon" provide support for pseudonyms and other forms of alternative identity not tied to people's government-issued ID. However it remains unclear what "soon" means.

Meanwhile, Google has announced that it will soon make major changes to Google Reader (an RSS reader used by many people to follow, manage, and share content from a large volume of news and blog feeds). Some of the social sharing functions will be eliminated and Reader will be integrated more closely into Google Plus. What Google staff apparently did not anticipate is how these changes will hurt some users including Iranian users struggling to share information despite harsh censorship. Because Google Reader is encrypted with https, it is harder for the Iranian government to block than most other overseas sites and services. As one Iranian blogger explains:

Google Reader acts like a news spreading website. Easy access to Google reader made it suitable for Iranian community and through all these years, specially after June 2009 election, developed an strong community for spreading the news.

Elimination of Reader's sharing functions will put an end to this. Even worse, if Reader is integrated with Google Plus before the company finds a way to accommodate pseudonymous users and other forms identity not tied to people's government-issued identity, Iranian users will be left even further in the cold.

Microsoft's Russia problem highlights a bigger problem

Many companies go on the defensive or go into denial mode, head-in-the-sand mode, and even petulant adolescent mode when confronted by reports like this one in the Sunday New York Times. Not Microsoft. In the face of clear evidence that Microsoft has been used by Russian authorities to crack down on activists under a thinly veiled pretext of intellectual property enforcement, Microsoft reacted in a grown-up, responsible manner. Senior Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith wrote a long blog post the very next day in which Microsoft accepted full responsibility and accountability for what has happened in Russia, launched an independent investigation, and announced that Microsoft will release a free blanket license for use of Microsoft software by non governmental organizations and take further measures to prevent authorities from raiding NGO offices on vague allegations of using pirated Microsoft software. The NYT follow-up story is here. 

We've yet to see the text of the new blanket license. My understanding is that it will not be for global use, but rather is an emergency measure for use in specific countries where the kind of problem described in the NYT story has happened or is seriously likely to happen. Microsoft already has an existing program to donate free and legal software to NGO's which organizations all around the world can avail themselves of. 

As a member of the Global Network Initiative (on whose board of directors I currently sit) Microsoft is coordinating closely with several human rights groups to try to ensure that the word gets out about the new blanket license as well as the existing software donation program, and is showing seriousness about making sure that vulnerable groups get the legal information and access to legal advice that they require. Efforts are also being made to make clear to authorities that Microsoft's concerns about piracy should not be used as a tool to crack down on political activism. 

While Microsoft has received deserved praise and positive press for its rapid response, it is not escaping criticism. Alan Wexelblat at Copyfight points out correctly that human rights groups have been discussing the over-all problem with Microsoft for some time, but that Microsoft did not act forcefully enough until the bad publicity spurred them into action. 

Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing that can happen with a big multinational corporation whose bread and butter depends on the sale of intellectual property. One can easily imagine how the people whose job it is to implement the company's GNI commitments to institutionalize respect and concern for human rights throughout all far-flung branches of Microsoft were not nearly as visible, audible, or powerful in the eyes of Microsoft's local employees and legal counsel compared to those sending a very strong message - with very concrete sets of incentives and disincentives - from headquarters about the need to combat software piracy.  Of course, piracy is rampant in Russia and many other countries where human rights violations also happen to be rampant.

Intellectual property law professor Michael Geist discusses the broader problem of messaging and priorities not only by American multinationals but also by the U.S. government, whose trade policies are shaped by heavy lobbying by U.S. companies who are pushing for stronger global IP protections: 

While the Microsoft response is a good one, it must be noted the abuse of IP enforcement is surely connected to efforts by the U.S. government and copyright lobby groups to actively encourage Russia to increase its IP enforcement.  The US has regularly cited Russia in its Special 301 report, this year including it on the Priority Watch list.  The IIPA, the industry lobby group that includes software associations,pushed the U.S. to target Russia, saying that is imperative that prosecutors bring more IPR cases.  In fact, the IIPA complained that Russian authorities do not seize enough computers when conducting raids.  On top of all this is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which will provide Russia with a template to follow on IP enforcement, including new seizure powers with less court oversight.  

It has often been pointed out that the ACTA/Special 301 report approach seeks to export tougher enforcement measures - often to countries where free speech is not a given - without including the exceptions, due process, and balancing provisions. The recent Russian case highlights why this is such a dangerous and misguided approach that is apt to cause more problems than it solves.

Denise Howell at ZDNet adds her two cents about the controversial international treaty for intellectual property rights enforcement that the U.S. is negotiating with a select group of countries behind closed doors: 

This story seems particularly timely given that finalization of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is imminent. Even without ACTA, a government in search of a pretext has all the tools it needs to ransack or seize computers in the name of protecting foreign copyright holders. ACTA promises to provide a whole new legal infrastructure and justification for such tactics, in addition to the myriad concerns it raises simply if enforced in a non-corrupt, as-intended manner

If the U.S. government's rhetoric about "Internet freedom" is sincere (and there are plenty of cynics who doubt it), it's time to stop sending contradictory, hypocritical messages about policy priorities - saying one thing and then acting in ways that send a rather different kind of message. Otherwise situations like the Microsoft Russia fiasco are just the beginning. It is essential that in the course of protecting intellectual property rights, due process, rule of law, and respect for free expression and privacy must be strengthened instead of eroded. Corporations and the trade negotiators who do their bidding need to understand that eroding democracy abroad and weakening it at home is an unacceptable price to pay for the protection of intellectual property. There has got to be a better and more balanced way forward. Policymakers are going to have to be much more innovative in their approaches to make sure that one policy isn't negating another. Companies need to adapt their business models and business practices not only to the irreversible realities of the Internet age, but also to a global business environment where markets are expanding fastest in places where corruption, thuggery and human rights violations are often the rule instead of the exception. That means taking a much more difficult, uncharted path forward. But the alternative is simply unacceptable.

UPDATE (9/15): Be sure to read the excellent commentary, Jack-Booted Thugs and Copyright Enforcement, by the EFF's Richard Esguerra. He concludes: 

If the copyright lobby gets their way with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) or ifgovernments continue to act on the claim that "piracy" demands sweeping changes to Internet privacy and freedom, then we can generalize the New York Times headline — "Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent" — into something we'll surely see more often: "Regime Uses Copyright Violations to Curtail Freedoms."

This episode should remind legislators and policymakers worldwide of the real risk that powers enacted in the name of copyright enforcement can to be used to do real harm. Ensuring balance in copyright law is not just good copyright policy — it's necessary to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms worldwide.

On Google's license renewal and principled engagement

After a week of mixed signals and speculation (see previous blog post), the Chinese government has decided to renew Google's web license.

While a number of commentators are interpreting this as a "climbdown" or "wimp out" by Google, I don't understand how they have reached that conclusion. As I pointed out last week, the only thing that has changed since March is that after typing "google.cn" into the browser's address bar and hitting "return," users have to make one extra click before reaching the uncensored google.com.hk. While the google.cn page now includes links to music, translation, and shopping services, the search box you see there on the page is just a static image that takes you immediately to google.com.hk as soon as you click on it. If you have grade school literacy in Chinese it's extremely obvious from looking at that page that if you want to search anything other than music or shopping you can simply click through to google.com.hk. I don't see how adding the extra click prevents users of Google's general search from using the service any more than the direct redirection from google.cn to google.com.hk which Google implemented in March. Of course, if you are searching from inside China and don't know that you can add an "s" to the "http:" in the address box and avail yourself of the "https" encrypted function that make your searches invisible to the Chinese network operators, searches on politically sensitive terms will get blocked by the Great Firewall. But that has been true since the redirection began. It hasn't changed. So Google's change implemented last week has no substantive impact on what Chinese Internet users can or cannot access via google.cn.

The change has, however, brought them into technical compliance with the regulations. And the authorities - for whatever reason - have decided that this change is sufficient despite the fact that in spirit Google is no closer to compliance with their wishes than it was in late March.

Since Chinese regulators don't confide in me personally I can only speculate on their motivations. It seems that the pragmatists have prevailed over the ideologues in this case. If Google's web license were to be denied, Google would be shut out of China completely. That sends a very negative message to the international business community, which is already concerned about China's politicized business environment. Questions would be raised about barriers to trade. The problem could be taken to the governmental level at a time when the last thing the U.S. and China need is more cause for tension. Now that Google.cn is in technical legal compliance and the uncensored search engine has been taken offshore out of mainland Chinese jurisdiction to Hong Kong where it is perfectly legal, it's better for Chinese regulators to declare victory and allow Google to pursue business activities in China that do not run afoul of Chinese regulations: R&D, advertising sales, mobile operating platforms, etc.

Another reason why it's in China's interest to let Google engage in China despite its resistance to censorship has to do with China's long term strategy for economic competitiveness and innovation. As the recent government white paper on the Internet made clear, Internet and mobile services are a core component of China's strategy for success as a global economic powerhouse. Keeping out foreign competition might be good for Chinese companies in the short term, but not in the long term. If Chinese companies are going to compete with the world's most innovative companies, they're not going to succeed if they're sheltered from competition in their home market because the domestic business environment is excessively political. I know that many influential CEO's of China's most successful Internet and telecoms companies certainly believe that an over-insulated market is not good for their businesses in the long run.  It is my impression that this point has been getting made, quietly, to people in the government over the past few months. This point of view has even managed to surface into the public domain here and there on the Internet. One of the most compelling examples were remarks made by Edward Tian, "the father of Chinese broadband" at an IT industry forum held in Shenzhen in late March soon after Google began redirecting google.cn to google.com.hk. Tian said (translated by Luke Habberstad at China Digital Times):

You ask: who is the winner? Is Li Yanhong (co-founder of Baidu) the winner? This is hard to say. After Google left, many angry youth in our country said this was good. However, Google is also China’s best tool for understanding the West. In order to make the West understand the achievements of China’s reform and opening, many have to search through Google. Baidu maybe needs 10 or 20 more years before it can be acceptable to the Internet users of the West. It is possible that our reform and opening has lost a great tool for external publicity. We have to consider a question from two sides.

The second problem. Google is not just for searching. Google represents the future of information technology, since the Google search engine and Google cloud computing [support IT technology] behind the scenes. When we make this sort of company such a big rival, are we not also rejecting these technologies? Let us consider the accomplishments we have now achieved with a modernized core attitude. They came precisely from having an open mind. We brought over the Western invention of mobile communication and the Western invention of photo-communication, and took the title of being the nation with the largest telecommunications company in the world (China Mobile), thus achieving a leap in development. In the future, software technology might emerge in a form that uses Google services. Can we simply follow one sentence from Comrade Lenin and then throw the baby out with the bath water? We need to consider these questions.

Perhaps the people who approved Google's license found such arguments convincing, and in this case chose the long-term economic interests of the Chinese people over victory in one small skirmish.

On Google's part, they retain a foothold in the Chinese market while remaining true to their January pledge that they would no longer censor their Chinese search engine. And yes, I ran some tests today with politically sensitive Chinese-language terms on Google.com.hk. The results were not identical to Google.com because all the local Google search engines favor local content more heavily (thus results are not the same on Google.fr, Google.de, or Google.jp vs Google.com either). But I found no evidence of political censorship. For example: in a search for the Chinese language words for "Tiananmen square massacre" Google.com.hk returns all kinds of material containing details of June 4th 1989 carnage including graphic videos at the top of the video search.

Some commentators are slamming Google for capitulating because the company wants to remain engaged in China at all. Frankly I don't think that the cause of freedom and openness in China would be well served if all Western Internet companies pulled out of China completely. I don't believe its a simple matter of all-in or all-out, engage or disengage, with nothing in between. What's important is how you engage. Are your business practices, products and services helping to move things in a more open direction? Or are you collaborating with the surveillance and jailing of dissidents and providing cover and legitimacy to the world's most sophisticated censorship system? I believe it can be possible to engage in China while upholding core principles on free expression and privacy. To say that it isn't easy is a massive understatement. I'm not saying Google has always done everything right or that they won't make mistakes in the future - in China or elsewhere. But I am hopeful that they will continue find it in their global, long-term business interest to try to do the right thing, correct their mistakes and acknowledge wrongdoing when that happens, and continue to work with activists and socially responsible investors to prove that principled engagement is not only possible, but necessary.

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Google's China troubles continue; Congress examines U.S. investment in Chinese censorship

In his latest blog post, Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond reports that Chinese authorities aren't happy with the automatic redirection of Google.cn to Hong Kong. They are threatening not to renew Google's Internet Content Provider license, which is required to legally operate any kind of Internet business in China. In an attempt to thread the legal needle, Drummond says Google.cn will now lead to a landing page which - if you click anywhere on that page - takes the user to the uncensored Google.com.hk. This is Google's convoluted way of adjusting Google.cn so that it remains technically in compliance with Chinese law while still sending Chinese users to an uncensored site. Now they just have to click through an extra page to get to the results.

It's unclear whether this will be acceptable to the Chinese authorities. It really depends on how secure or insecure they're feeling these days. In the meantime, the new landing page is a signal to Chinese users that they may want to remember Google.com.hk just in case Google.cn ceases to work, or update their browser bookmark.

What will happen next?  Any one of four scenarios is possible:

1. The Chinese government renews Google's ICP license and Google.com.hk remains unblocked. Google.cn remains just a landing page which sends users to Google.com.hk when they click anywhere on the page. While Google.com.hk remains unblocked, though specific searches containing sensitive words will continue to be blocked. Nothing has changed except that users have to click through an extra page before they can start searching.

2. The Chinese government renews Google's ICP license but blocks Google.com.hk. People can get to the landing page via Google.cn, but after clicking on it they get an error message in their browser. Users who don't know how to use circumvention tools will no longer be able to continue accessing Google's uncensored search (unless they know to go to Google.com which as of now, I believe, remains unblocked).

3. The Chinese government does not renew Google's ICP license but does not block Google.com.hk. Google.cn will no longer work. Chinese Internet users will be able to access Google.com.hk if they happen know enough to type a different URL into their browser.

4. The Chinese government does not renew Google's ICP license and also blocks Google.com.hk. In this case, users will only be able to access the Hong Kong-based uncensored search if a) they know about the Google.com.hk URL and b) know how to use proxy servers or circumvention tools.

Which one do you predict? Let me know in the comments section if you'd like.

Meanwhile, it just so happens that tomorrow the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission will be holding a hearing on "China's Information Control Practices and the Implications for the United States." I've been asked to testify on Baidu's role in China's Internet censorship system and the role played by U.S. investment in Chinese Internet censorship. My written testimony can be downloaded here (PDF).

I begin by describing China's recent political innovation which I call networked authoritarianism. I then explain how the private sector in general - and Baidu in particular - fits into this system. I discuss the impact of Google's withdrawal from China, then conclude with some comments about the role of U.S. investment. Here is my conclusion:

The question is: Even as government censorship requirements grow increasingly onerous, dominant players solidify and expand their market positions at the expense of smaller upstarts, and the frustration of many Chinese Internet executives grows, will anybody in the Chinese business community dare to challenge the government policies and practices that have caused this situation? Or will they continue to feel that they have no choice if they want to continue making money?

As I have described in my testimony, the Chinese government has transferred much of the cost of censorship to the private sector. The American investment community has so far been willing to fund Chinese innovation in censorship technologies and systems without complaint or objection. Under such circumstances, Chinese industry leaders have little incentive and less encouragement to resist government demands that often contradict even China’s own laws and constitution.

Two of Baidu’s five Directors are American. U.S. investors provided much of Baidu’s startup capital. U.S. institutional investors own significant stakes in the company.To be fair, American investment dollars support many businesses around the world that human rights groups and environmentalists have identified as unethical or destructive to our health and our planet. Yet in the wake of the financial crisis and the BP oil spill, it is also clear that millions of people around the world are paying an unacceptably high price for unethical – or at very least amoral – investment practices. We will not see the end of our problems unless industry and investors own up to their broader responsibilities to society and to the planet. I predict that the prospects for freedom and democracy around the world will similarly be diminished if our investments continue to support censorship and surveillance.

For the ethical investor, there are two possible responses to this problem. One is divestment from all ethically challenging situations. The other is engagement and advocacy, using financial leverage to work for positive change in industry practices and even government regulation.  Such efforts often require patience and take time to bear fruit, but experience in other sectors such as mining and manufacturing show that proactive, socially responsible investment combined with advocacy and engagement can make a difference over time.

I believe the Chinese people would be worse off if all American companies and investors were to abandon the Chinese Internet. Investors who remain silent, however, should be clear about what kind of innovation they are financing. In addition to whatever product or service they set out to invest in, they are also supporting a disturbing new political innovation: networked authoritarianism.

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China's Internet White Paper: networked authoritarianism in action

The release of the Chinese government's first-ever White Paper on the Internet in China provoked some head-scratching here in the Western world. Part Three of the six-part document is titled "Guaranteeing Citizens' Freedom of Speech on the Internet." I've heard from several journalists and policy analysts (not people based in China, for whom such cognitive dissonance is normal) who at first glance thought they were reading The Onion or some kind of parody site. How, people asked me, can a government that so blatantly censors the Internet claim with a straight face to be protecting and upholding freedom of speech on the Internet? The answer of course is that China's netizens are free to do everything... except for the things they're not free to do.  The list of the latter, outlined in the next section titled Protecting Internet Security is long, vague, and subject to considerable interpretation:

...The Chinese government attaches great importance to protecting the safe flow of Internet information, actively guides people to manage websites in accordance with the law and use the Internet in a wholesome and correct way. The Decision of the National People's Congress Standing Committee on Guarding Internet Security, Regulations on Telecommunications of the People's Republic of China and Measures on the Administration of Internet Information Services stipulate that no organization or individual may produce, duplicate, announce or disseminate information having the following contents: being against the cardinal principles set forth in the Constitution; endangering state security, divulging state secrets, subverting state power and jeopardizing national unification; damaging state honor and interests; instigating ethnic hatred or discrimination and jeopardizing ethnic unity; jeopardizing state religious policy, propagating heretical or superstitious ideas; spreading rumors, disrupting social order and stability; disseminating obscenity, pornography, gambling, violence, brutality and terror or abetting crime; humiliating or slandering others, trespassing on the lawful rights and interests of others; and other contents forbidden by laws and administrative regulations.

Other than that, people are totally free. What's more, the use of the Internet by the people to "supervise" public officials is praised. As long as - in the process of said supervision - state power is not subverted, "state honor" is not jeopardized, nobody is humiliated or slandered, and no "rumors" are spread. The rise of Twitter-like microblogging services is even praised. (Twitter itself is blocked by the "great firewall," though tens of thousands of Chinese Internet users are believed to access it anyway through third-party clients and circumvention tools).

As I've frequently pointed out in the past (see here, here and here for starters), blocking of foreign websites like Twitter is just the top layer of Chinese Internet censorship. Beneath the "great firewall of China" is a sophisticated system by which censorship is delegated to the private sector. The first company to set up a Chinese Twitter-clone was a startup called Fanfou. Last June they got shut down because they failed to police the service adequately: users apparently shared too much content that violated the above no-no list. Other micro-blog services have since emerged. One run by the People's Daily and another by the popular web portal Sina.com. They seem to have learned from Fanfou's troubles and have put aggressive censorship systems in place. As Chen Tong, Sina's head editor, recently commented at a 3G Wireless Industry Summit: "controlling content in Sina microblogs is a problem which is a very big headache." (The Shanghaiist blog reports that the Sina.com news article reporting Chen's comments has itself been censored, but not before getting quoted and reported around the Internet.) According to the Sina.com account of his remarks, Chen went on to describe Sina's microblog-censorship strategy in some detail: 24-7 policing; constant coordination between the editorial department and the "monitoring department" (all social networking companies in China must have one of those in order to stay in compliance with government expectations);  daily meetings; and systems through which both editors and users are constantly reporting problematic content. 

Even so, Chen Tong says in his speech that microblogging has been tremendously empowering in China. He says that micro-blogs have become "people's personal web portals" and that a lot of recent incidents that have generated widespread public concern first emerged on microblogs.

Despite all the policing and the round-the-clock censorship, Chinese Internet users still feel much more empowered to participate in public discourse and even bring issues to national attention than they ever could have imagined in the past. (See Guobin Yang's excellent book, The Power of the Internet in China for many examples.) As I described it to one journalist, it's as if a bird that has lived in a cage all its life (one which has been gradually upgraded, with steadily improving food and which is much cleaner than it used to be) suddenly gets released into a large atrium. The bird is likely to feel excited and empowered for quite some time and may not realize that even broader freedom is possible or even desirable: after all, without the atrium walls might she get lost and starve? Or get eaten by other birds? There are plenty of security arguments in favor of supporting the atrium's legitimacy and necessity; there are even ethical justifications. 

Thus China is pioneering what I call "networked authoritarianism." Compared to classic authoritarianism, networked authoritarianism permits – or shall we say accepts the Internet’s inevitable consequences and adjusts – a lot more give-and-take between government and citizens than in a pre-Internet authoritarian state. While one party remains in control, a wide range of conversations about the country’s problems rage on websites and social networking services. The government follows online chatter, and sometimes people are even able to use the Internet to call attention to social problems or injustices, and even manage to have an impact on government policies. As a result, the average person with Internet or mobile access has a much greater sense of freedom – and may even feel like they have the ability to speak and be heard – in ways that weren’t possible under classic authoritarianism. It also makes most people a lot less likely to join a movement calling for radical political change. In many ways, the regime actually uses the Internet not only to extend its control but also to enhance its legitimacy.

At the same time, in the networked authoritarian state there is no guarantee of individual rights and freedoms. People go to jail when the powers-that-be decide they are too much of a threat – and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. Truly competitive, free and fair elections do not happen. The courts and the legal system are tools of the ruling party. 

Connecting every citizen in China to the Internet via multiple devices might sound like something the Chinese Communist Party would want to avoid. Several people who contacted me about China's Internet White Paper were surprised at the Chinese government's enthusiasm for connectivity. Such enthusiasm does not jive with most American and European notions of how an authoritarian state would be run by a party that calls itself Communist. What's important to understand is that Chinese authoritarianism in the Internet age is not the same as the crumbling, centrally-planned authoritarianism of the Eastern Bloc, disconnected from the Western capitalist world.

The CCP leadership recognizes that they can’t control everybody all the time if they’re going to be a technologically advanced global economic powerhouse. What’s more, high Internet penetration is necessary if the Chinese government wants to continue high rates of economic growth, which economists agree requires boosting domestic consumer demand as well as pushing Chinese companies to the cutting edge of technological innovation.  China catapulted itself to become the world’s second largest economy by turning itself into the world’s factory. But Chinese labor has grown expensive compared to some other markets in poorer countries. In order to stay competitive and keep growing, China needs to transition from a manufacturing-fueled economy to an economy fueled by domestic consumption at home, while being an innovator for advanced technologies and services that can compete with American and European companies. 

Another component of the Chinese Communist Party’s survival strategy involves influencing the Internet’s technical evolution in ways that are most compatible with censorship and surveillance goals. China already has more Internet users than there are Americans on the planet. As the world’s biggest market for Internet technologies, it is starting to influence how these technologies evolve. The Internet is quickly morphing from something we’ve mainly used through our computers into a new, more mobile phase in which all devices, appliances and vehicles – from our phones to our cars to our refrigerators – will be connected to the network. The Chinese government is embracing this future. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao now gives speeches in which he waxes enthusiastic about the “Internet of things.”  Chinese Internet and telecommunications companies receive substantial government support in hopes that they will lead the world in shaping the next generation of Internet technologies.

Beyond China, the fastest-growing markets for mobile Internet technologies are in Asia, the Middle East and Africa: exactly those parts of the world where authoritarian governments are most concentrated. Chinese telecommunications companies like Huawei and ZTE (the “Ciscos of China”) are already dominant in many African and Middle Eastern markets. They are building Internet and mobile networks in countries whose governments would prefer to have their systems built by Chinese engineers rather than by Americans.

Another thing that has puzzled some of the American journalists and analysts who contacted me is the Chinese government's assertion of its "sovereignty" on the Internet, given that the Internet is a globally inter-connected network and derives much of its value from the fact that borders are collapsed online. Yet at the same time, it's a physical reality that web sites have to be hosted physically on computers that are located in some jurisdiction or another; they are operated by physical human beings who reside under a government jurisdiction and can thus be physically controlled when necessary; they are operated by businesses that have to be registered in one or more jurisdiction and their physical operations are subject to government regulation; and the Internet runs on networks that physically exist within or pass through nation-states. The White Paper is a clear articulation of the Chinese government's long-standing position that nation-states should have "sovereignty" over all aspects of the Internet - human or equipment or signal - that reside within or pass through Chinese sovereign territory. Google is challenging this notion as it pushes the U.S. government to take action against China for violating WTO rules by using censorship as a barrier to trade. (For further discussion of China and Internet sovereignty see this Interview with Columbia University's Tim Wu conducted by The New Yorker's Evan Osnos.)

The White Paper also re-emphasizes the Chinese government's long-standing position that the global coordination tasks required to make the Internet function - what Internet policy wonks call "Internet governance" - are best left to governments, not private entities or companies or others.  The White Paper did not condemn ICANN, the private non-profit which coordinates the Internet's domain name system - in fact it didn't even mention ICANN or other non-governmental organizations that coordinate the Internet's functions and anoint preferred global technical standards. Nor did it say anything negative about the "multi-stakeholder" governance approach currently favored by Western democracies, which includes non-governmental "civil society" organizations alongside governments and companies. But the document made clear China's position that " the UN should be given full scope in international Internet administration." As Brendan Kuerbis of the Internet Governance Project puts it, China is not intending to disengage from the existing Internet governance frameworks, but can be expected to exert its influence in shaping these frameworks in its preferred direction.

The White Paper's message is that the Chinese government is not running scared from the Internet. It is embracing the Internet head-on, intends to be a leader in its global evolution, and intends to assert its influence on how the global Internet is governed and regulated.

Note that China is not the only country seeking to assert its brand of Internet sovereignty. For an analysis of what's happening in Russia, read this chilling overview by Gregory Aslomov at Global Voices. For more on the Russia situation as well as an alarming global overview, be sure to read “Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace” just published by the Open Net Initiative.

On a more optimistic note, the White Paper does have its domestic critics. Blogger, journalist and journalism professor Hu Yong argues (writing on a domestic blog which has not been censored) that most of the regulations governing the Chinese Internet have no clear basis in Chinese law and are arguably unconstitutional. "At a time when the Internet is raising a lot of questions that we don't have answers to," he writes, "the government may not have the best solutions. It's possible that the Internet could give birth to new forms of regulation that aren't as coercive, and which place greater trust in the strength of individual freedom and the self-governance of citizens." While the Internet does need to be regulated, he concludes, the public needs to participate in the creation of those regulations. 

But as long as all of China's Internet companies and the few foreign Internet companies with a local presence in China continue to do whatever the government demands, no matter how little legal or constitutional legitimacy such demands might have, the government will have little incentive to accept the kind of change that Hu Yong envisions. Note that many of the big Chinese companies receive American investment dollars or are publicly traded on U.S. stock exchanges, sending a clear message that whatever U.S. elected officials might say about "Internet freedom," many American investors are quite happy to profit from China's status quo.

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More problems in Facebookistan

UPDATE: Click here to read the response to this post by Facebook's Barry Schnitt, Director, Policy Communications, followed by reactions from others, including Rafik Dammak whose account suspension is discussed in this post.

Privacy is only one many problems eroding users' trust in Facebook. Don't forget Facebook's inconsistent and untransparent approach to account deactivation and page takedowns. I recently wrote about how Hong Kong democracy activists have had pages disabled or deleted with no explanation. Robert Scoble recently reported on how a Texas radio show recently had its Facebook page disabled, and that he gets "a new email from someone who has gotten removed from Facebook every week." [This sentence has been corrected thanks to "Wrldvoyagr" in the comments section, below.] Scoble continues:

They need a more mature approach toward customer service. People and content are still getting deleted by spam filters which no one understands or can explain to me and there isn’t good place to go to appeal content deletions. This the problem with not having a federated system that runs on our own servers. Facebook has too much control over our digital lives and that power to delete content really freaks me out.

The problem is especially upsetting for Facebook's international users, particularly those who come from countries where there is heavy censorship and political repression. Rafik Dammak, a Tunisian student living in Tokyo and who is an upstanding and active member of the global Internet community and represents non-commercial Internet users on one of ICANN's councils, announced last week that his Facebook account was suspended without warning. "They don't bother to give rationales, we have to "trust" them," he later wrote on Twitter.  Rafik did e-mail [email protected] to complain, (Updated/corrected details:) Rafik says he was chatting with a friend on Tuesday when suddenly a message popped up telling him to log back in. When he did so, received this generic message (click to enlarge) which began: "Hi Rafik, Unfortunately your account has been permanently disabled for violating Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities [link added]. We will not be able to reactivate it for any reason, nor will we provide further explanation of your violation or the systems we have in place. This decision is absolutely final." The e-mail then continues on with instructions about how to flag abusive content.

While Rafik has no way of knowing for sure why Facebook deactivated his account, he has some theories. In an e-mail exchange, he and Nasser Weddady, a Mauritanian activist based in Boston, described a concerted "abuse-reporting" campaign being carried out against Tunisian exiles, activists, and other Facebook users who the people conducting the campaign don't like. Rafik pointed to a couple of Facebook pages (here and here) which he says are devoted to targeting and organizing abuse-reporting efforts against specific Facebook users. France 24 has a report in French about those groups here. Here's how Nasser explained it to me:

This phenomenon seems to have been first triggered by the mass protest over things like the Danish Cartoons and Mohamed's portrayals. But the novelty now is the extent at which some pro-government elements in Tunisia resorted to this tactic to shut down dissenter groups or individual user accounts, most to seem to be targeted on account of their political views but that is not always the case hence the name in Arabic: Moubid which means insecticide. This is how it works:

- A user with a large following designates a group as "subversive"

-spreads the news to his following by inviting other users with the explicit request to pass it on in order to create a snowball effect

-Facebook agrees to shut down the group most likely based on the number of complaints

As you can see, it is a double abuse: an abuse by users who embark on witch hunts just because someone said those accounts or facebook groups are bad, and an abuse of facebook's opaque policy on designating groups as violating its users agreement.

There was a similar phenomenon during the last Gaza war, when pro-palestinan users accounts and groups were targeted by pro-israel groups and individuals in a similar way as in Tunisia. While, it is very difficult to prove that the Tunisians learned that technique from the pro-israel advocates, the first malicious precedent we know of in the Middle East is that one.

In early May Curt Hopkins wrote an article on ReadWriteWeb about how Facebook's move over the past year to make people's accounts and pages public by default had made it easier for such harrassment to occur. While he quotes Facebook representatives who insisted that they don't deactivate accounts without human review, it's clear that something remains seriously wrong with their system.

This larger context also helps explain the extent to which moderate and cosmopolitan Muslim Facebook users who believe in free speech and who are generally against censorship were so alienated and upset by the fact that Facebook allowed the "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" page - which on the several occasions when I looked at it was full of obscene and gratuitous anti-Muslim hate speech - to stay up for more than a week. It's well known that Facebook quickly takes down other racist and anti-semitic pages. Yet they allowed a page full of nastiness and hate against the Muslim faith to stay up. We also know from this interview given by one of the page's administrators to Radio Free Europe that Facebook admins were in touch with the page's creators and "not in a negative way," as administrator Andy Freiheit (a pseudonym) put it.

Many things remain seriously wrong in Facebookistan.

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In search of "Internet freedom"

At the end of the Global Voices Summit in Santiago, Chile earlier this month, Ethan Zuckerman and I led a session in which we asked everybody in the room to help answer a question: "How do we keep the Internet open and free?" In his blog post titled "How big is Internet freedom?" Ethan does a great job of summarizing the range of responses - and lack of agreement.  In the room that day were a diverse group of people: activists, citizen-bloggers, journalists, civil liberties lawyers, educators, and academics, as well as people who work for foundations, companies, international organizations and governments. Not all of these people felt comfortable about being in the same room with some of the others, as Ethan's post reflects, and as others like Andrew from EngageMedia have also commented. Yet everybody was united by the fact that they characterize their work to be related in some way to one or all of six things:

• building platforms that facilitate online expression, discourse, and/or organizing;
• fighting censorship and surveillance;
• working to shape laws and policies in a way that protects and facilitates people's ability to exercise their rights to free expression and assembly;
• informing the public about threats by governments, companies, or others to online free expression and assembly through various forms of research and reporting;
• educating the public about how to use technologies that can help us exercise our rights when they are threatened by censorship and surveillance;
• providing financial support for one or more of the above.

Debate centered around the following issues:

Government involvement: Some activists were very uncomfortable about the fact that a young woman from the U.S. State Department, whose job is to work on "Internet freedom" issues, attended our public conference - a conference that was free for anybody who registered before we ran out of space. Global Voices Advocacy Director Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian exile and grassroots activist, said he worries government money is poisoning the online activism space, causing grassroots causes to be hijacked or used by geopolitical actors who he feels are more interested in influencing the politics of certain countries in  certain directions than in the welfare and safety of specific individuals on the ground. He is also concerned that U.S. government money, inspired by the Obama Administration's new "Internet freedom" agenda, means that activists in politically "sexy" countries like China and Iran get lots of support and attention, while the problems faced by activists in countries whose Internet repression is less well covered in the global English-language media, from Tunisia to Russia to Thailand to Syria, are largely ignored. A lively debate about this issue ensued, with Bob Boorstin of Google (who once worked as a speechwriter in the Clinton Administration) called Sami's position "paranoid" and pointed out that like it or not, governments are players in this space. This could be a good thing, he said, if it leads to greater honesty and transparency among all governments about how they are trying to regulate and control various online and mobile spaces. An activist from Brazil argued that taking an "us vs. them" stance towards government is "b.s." "We can't keep government out of the Internet because government is part of the Internet," he said. Certainly, those of us who are citizens of democracies need to push our governments to be consistent and transparent about what they are doing in this space. We have a responsibility to make sure that our tax money is not being spent in a counterproductive, hypocritical, or duplicitous manner. That much we owe to Sami and the vulnerable grassroots communities around the world that he works with.

Corporate-owned platforms and services: Both Google and Yahoo were active at the conference and helped to fund it, along with a number of foundations. Google - along with Reuters - also funded a new Breaking Borders award for individuals or groups doing extraordinary work to promote free expression online. Google is in constant friction with a range of governments - from democracies to autocracies - seeking to regulate its platforms in various ways. While Google's executives have made a commitment to do the socially responsible thing for reasons that are honorable, it's also true that it's in Google's corporate interest to align itself with the global online free speech movement as it faces regulatory battles around the world.  As I reported in my last blog post, YouTube's Victoria Grand participated in a lively session dedicated to the human rights implications of content moderation. Yet a number of participants voiced concern about over-reliance on corporate-owned platforms and service providers. As Ethan put it in an important blog post back in March: "These entities have no more legal obligation to allow open, unfettered political speech in their spaces than shopping malls do to host political rallies."

Which brings us back to the issue of "netizenship." If we depend on commercial services and platforms for our expression and assembly online, then we have to stop acting like passive "users" and start acting like "citizens" of these spaces: organizing with others and pushing the companies to act in the public interest and to take free expression and human rights fully into account. Companies will only change their practices if they feel that their brand reputations and business success depend on it.

One could build open-source, non-profit, community administered web-hosting platforms, social networking services, and e-mail systems that would not depend on companies for the most part. Mozilla's Drumbeat movement aims to educate the broader public about non-proprietary and open source alternatives available out there - and seeks to build a robust "open web" that supports a thriving international community of content creators, programmers, and citizens who take responsibility for building and defending the Internet we want. Perhaps things will evolve in a manner similar to how, in many democracies, you have commercial media companies coexisting alongside non-profit public media funded by foundations and audience donations (and in some cases also government subsidies and tax money). In cyberspace both for-profit and non-profit spaces can coexist peacefully, each serving different needs of different kinds of people and communities. Society benefits from having both, as there are some social needs - and social groups - which companies may never have much interest in serving or respecting. The "open web" can also help to keep the commercial spaces honest.

This however still doesn't solve the problem of commercial carriers lower down in the stack: Internet Service Providers in many parts of the world are monopolies and we often have little choice about who provides our basic connectivity. One self-described "anarchist" from Brazil is working to build mesh networks that would enable people to access the Internet without going through a commercial ISP. If communities could create viable mesh networks as alternatives to commercial ISP's in cases where ISP's are non-existent, unreliable, or untrustworthy, that would be interesting, but it would require a great deal more public engagement and activism than we've seen anywhere thus far.

New rights or old rights?  Do we need a new Bill of Rights for Cyberspace as Jeff Jarvis and others have suggested? In Brazil they've already drafted such a document, now up for public discussion and comment. (The CPJ's Danny O'Brien provides some critical analysis of that draft, which might actually provide justification for more takedown of content without judicial oversight or due process, in the name of protecting the rights of people who are slandered.) Or do we simply need to work hard to make sure that existing internationally recognized covenants, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are fully applied to the Internet and upheld in both online and mobile spaces? A couple of efforts build on this idea. The Principles for corporate conduct developed by the Global Network Initiative are based on those existing international covenants. The Internet Governance Forum's Dynamic Coalition for Internet Rights and Principles is currently working on a document that seeks to elaborate on how existing human rights covenants should be applied by governments and companies to ICT's. That draft will be made public sometime over the summer. As a number of people at the Summit pointed out, most governments don't respect the existing rights covenants in "meatspace," and thus they're not terribly optimistic that such rights declarations will have much concrete impact. On the other hand, these U.N. documents are used by human rights activists worldwide as the moral baseline upon which to build their arguments against human rights violations. Documents clarifying how the UDHR and ICCPR should be applied to cyberspace might be helpful tools, but they are not going to lead to solutions in and of themselves.

Defining and coordinating goals across the global network  This is the toughest part. Cyberspace is a global network. What people do on and to it in the U.S. or Pakistan or China can have a global impact. "Freedom" in the context of cyberspace - or in the context of human civilization - does not mean "free for all." Nor does it mean that we won't pay for anything, depsite what some in the entertainment industry may insinuate. We don't want cyberspace to be a Hobbesian state of nature in which life is "nasty, brutish, and short." This is why modern governments gain their legitimacy from the idea of a "social contract," in which we give up some of our freedoms to do anything we please for the sake of the greater social good, and if we are in a democracy those laws, rules, and enforcement institutions are formed with our consent and supervision. So how do we work out a global social contract for the civilization we are building in cyberspace?

Back in March after Google withdrew its search engine from China,  British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote a column in The Guardian about how we urgently need a global debate and a global consensus around the idea that "everyone should be free to see everything, except for that limited set of things which clear, explicit global rules specify should not be available." He concluded:

It's in the infosphere that the world is coming closest, fastest, to a global village, so it's the infosphere that most urgently needs a global debate about the village rules. If we don't have that debate, and have it soon, then what you get to see on your screen will be the result of a power struggle between the old-fashioned power of the state in which you happen to be, the new-style power of the giant information companies, the insurgent force of novel information technologies, and the ingenuity of individual netizens. That's a likely outcome, but not the best.

But it's hard to find consensus - even amongst liberal internationalists with different cultural and religious backgrounds - about how to find the right balance between our right to free expression and assembly and our right to privacy and security. Even trickier is the question of what is "hate speech" and what constitutes justified criticism or even satire of one religion by members of another. The Global Voices community has come together around a set of common values around freedom of expression and communication. Our Manifesto begins: "We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak — and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech."  But all you need to do is to read this post about Pakistani reactions to the "Draw Mohammed Day" Facebook page, then read this post by another member of our community, to see how far we are from having a consensus about how civilized cross-cultural discourse should or shouldn't be managed on global Internet platforms.

Last August, Lisa Horner of Global Partners and Max Senges (then an academic, now at Google) published a paper titled Values, Principles, and Rights in Internet Governance, which called for a global, trans-cultural dialogue around two questions:
• Can we maintain cultural diversity while at the same time agreeing to universal values to underpin internet governance?
• Can we translate these values into practical guiding principles for different internet stakeholders, from the technical community through to regulators and users?

Looking at the world today, the answer would seem to be "No." But then we've not even attempted the kind of informed discourse that would be needed before ruling out "Yes" altogether.

Right now I see two fundamental obstacles to such a discourse. First, we don't have adequate global platforms on which to have such a multicultural discussion. As Global Voices continues to expand its multilingual translation community, and as we build capacity to translate conversations across different languages, maybe that could be a place to experiment.

Second, global publics don't have enough information to hold an informed discourse right now. People who follow global news and domestic politics in their home countries are not well informed about issues related to Internet governance, how software engineering and hardware design can affect our freedoms, how government regulations play out around the world, etc. Most news organizations cover technology as a business, cultural, and consumer phenomenon. Few journalists (I can count them on one hand) cover technology as a global political space. Very little technology journalism approaches stories with the goal of serving the interests of an informed global netizenry. We need global coverage of cyberspace as a new political space. This coverage needs to begin with questions like: "What do people need to know in order to be informed participants in shaping the future of our global network? What do people need to know in order to determine what their own interests are within the network, and to understand who and what is affecting those interests either negatively or positively? What do people need to know in order to figure out what kind of Internet they want? What do people need to know in order to understand and debate what is possible?  What do people need to know about the players, institutions, companies, and politics so that they can figure out how they as citizens of the network can take action?" We need hard-hitting, original, investigative stories that help to fill this void. Perhaps it's time for somebody to create such a news organization.

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Human rights implications of content moderation and account suspension by companies

Facebook deserves every bit of flak being flung at them for their cavalier and irresponsible attitude toward privacy. Another problem, however, has gotten much less attention: activists around the world who use Facebook to promote political and human rights causes frequently find their Facebook groups and accounts suspended.

In all cases that I've heard of, Facebook has been either unresponsive or unsympathetic to activists' complaints. Since the beginning of this year, pro-democracy groups in Hong Kong have complained of repeated deletion of their Facebook groups. One of these groups was called "Never Forget June Fourth," set up to commemorate the June 4th 1989 Tiananmen massacre. Last month some Hong Kong pro-democracy Facebook users wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg (in Facebook). Readers will be shocked and stunned to learn that neither The Zuck nor his colleagues bothered to respond to this letter:

Dear Mark,

We are users of Facebook with shared interests in the political development and democracy of Hong Kong and China. We have set up a political nature group page named ‘Never Forget June the Forth’. This group was formed to engage in a free exchange of ideas and remembrances around Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, and there has never been an intention to be abusive, or bullying or “take any action on Facebook that infringes or violates someone else’s right or otherwise violates the law,” to quote your own official policy.

Nevertheless, the group of key administrators and creator of ‘Never Forget June the Forth’ is being unfairly harassed by Facebook, which has blocked them from posting new content and working on it at all.

This latest violation of their rights comes on top of numerous other examples of harassment. Some sites have been closed without notice. Facebook has attributed the problems to “technical difficulties,” an explanation that strains common sense.

Therefore we are calling on Facebook to end this harassment (apparently done on behalf of Beijing). We feel, especially in light of what is happening at Google, that both the regional and global press will be interested in this story, should we choose to take it to them.

Please end your harassment, which will prevent us from taking this drastic step. The ball is in your court, and We are certain you can feel the moral weight of how this case may impact your reputation.

Sincerely,

Creator and Group of Administrators

While the group was eventually restored and revived (here) the people involved with it feel that Facebook has failed to communicate clearly with them so that these kinds of problems can be avoided in the future. People still have no idea what happened or why. Many suspect that the abuse-reporting mechanisms within Facebook are themselves being abused by governments and other powerful entities. Some including the authors of the above letter - thanks to Facebook's lack of honesty and transparency  - suspect Facebook is responding to pressure from governments, including Beijing. I myself doubt there is direct collusion between Facebook and the Chinese government, but I have concluded - based on their actions and inactions - that they don't give a toss about the human rights activists using their service, in spite of what their executives say in speeches about Facebook being a force for world peace and whatnot. In this discussion thread one Hong Kong user posted the following set of suggestions for how Facebook might treat activists with more care and respect:

Dear Mark,

I don't want reiterate what people said here. Here I point out a few things.

1. There is no doubt that Facebook is a commerical company. However, it is a leader in social networking now in the planet. It therefore undeniably bears certain social responsibility.

2. There is no clear guideline on when a political oriented group is banned or limited. Today, the removal of a group is all a subjective decision, which is not good enough. I oppose to removal of groups without a public reason, including groups holding opposite political view.

3. Abuse use of report mechanism is a problem. If the report is in fact invalid, and it is an organized act by a gang, there is no punishment at all. This really hurts freedom of speech. This leads to problem that people opens 2nd account to avoid get banned, or form a gang to counter act on the opponent with such report mechanism.

Ok. better to suggest rather than just complaint. Here is my suggestion

A. If it is a political group, pls list out the guideline and restrictions for the admins. What can be done and what can't. What extra limitation can be applied to political group. If violation is confirmed, warnings should be sent to all admins. If several warnings are ignored, FB has the reason to take action. If the group is banned, pls leave a page explaining why.

B. If confirmed case of abuse use of report mechanism, there should be "bad marks" accumulated for that user. Up to certain point, warning is given, and onwards, liable to be disabled.

C. For political group, do we have better option for admin to manage? e.g. ban certain user for 3 days just to let him calm down, or limit certain unfriendly action for 3 posts per 24 hrs. For all posts, unlike option, admin vote count for removal/warnings, and FB operator warnings flag are considered useful.

I think the above required your internal discussion and system modification. But I hope that your company will take my advice seriously.

Rgds
Justin

There are other examples from other regions. In March, Jillian York reported on Global Voices Advocacy that Facebook removed a Moroccan secularist group and its founder. While the group and the founder's personal account were eventually restored, "Facebook did not respond to any requests for an explanation."

I know of a couple of specific instances in which U.S.-based free speech and civil liberties organizations with contacts at Facebook have tried to get Facebook executives to have a conversation with some members of the human rights community to discuss this problem. Their efforts have all met with total radio silence. Facebook has shown zero interest in holding even a private conversation about this issue. Thus I can only conclude one or all of the following: They are in denial. Or they really don't care. Or they are overwhelmed and upset that people won't love them unconditionally and are sticking their head in the sand. Or they have such a Messiah complex that they really think anybody who wants to talk to them about their faults can only be an enemy.  If you have any further conclusions to contribute, feel free to add them in the comments section of this post.

Facebook is certainly not the only company with problems stemming from abuse-prevention and content moderation. There have been several cases in which human rights activists got their YouTube accounts deleted or disabled (the accounts were restored after an outcry from activists). Other activists have had takedown and suspension problems with Flickr, other Yahoo services, and domain hosting companies. But at least Google (YouTube's parent company) and Yahoo have been willing to engage with activists to discuss how content moderation and abuse-prevention mechanisms and procedures might be improved so that they can avoid inadvertent "censorship" of human rights activism taking place on their platforms. Both participated actively in a recent conference call convened by the Global Network Initiative, during which activists and people from the Internet industry held a frank discussion about how company practices can be improved - and how activists might also better educate themselves about terms of service and moderation procedures in order to anticipate and prevent problems. (Click here and scroll down to the bottom of the page for a contact e-mail if you want to get involved with further discussions.)

At last week's Global Voices Summit in Santiago, Chile, YouTube's Victoria Grand joined me, Jillian York, and Oiwan Lam of Hong Kong for a wide-ranging discussion on this issue. I've embedded the video below. At the beginning of the session I asked everybody in the room (probably around 80 people) whether they'd ever had problems with content being removed or accounts suspended on one of the social networking services they use. A couple dozen hands went up. I asked people for concrete suggestions about how netizens (I hate the word "users") and companies could work together on preventing inadvertent suppression of dissent on social networking platforms. Here are a few points that multiple people repeated:

• Automated moderation and abuse-prevention processes will inevitably result in mistakes that hurt activists. Human judgment - informed by adequate knowledge of cultures, languages, and political events around the world - needs to be brought into the mix.
• Companies need to be as transparent and open as possible about how their takedown, moderation, and suspension procedures work. Otherwise they have nobody but themselves to blame if users cease to trust them.
• Companies should designate staff members to focus on human rights. Their job should be to develop channels for regular communication with the human rights community.
• It's almost impossible for globally popular social networking and content-sharing services to hire enough staff with enough knowledge of political movements and disputes in all obscure corners of the world in all kinds of languages. But communities like Global Voices and others with large networks of bloggers and online activists all over the world are ready and willing to help companies keep abreast of political hot-button issues and online movements around the world - and even provide help with obscure languages - so that extra care can be taken, and political activism won't be mistaken for spam or some other form of abusive behavior. We just need to figure out how to set up workable mechanisms through which this kind of feedback, advice, and communication can take place.
• Activists need to pay closer attention the Terms of Service used by social networking platforms, and be more proactive in educating themselves about how moderation, takedown, and abuse-prevention mechanisms work. We probably need a "Guide to avoiding account suspension and takedown for human rights activists."
• It might also be good to have some kind of respected clearing house organization - or consortium of organizations - which can help mediate and resolve problems between activists and companies.
• People who rely on social networking and content sharing platforms run by companies to do political and social activism should engage more actively with company administrators to improve policies and practices. Anticipate problems and help solve them not only for yourself but for everybody else in the community. Act like a citizen. Not a passive "user."

Please share any further thoughts you may have in the comments section of this post. Below is the video from our Global Voices session last week.

Global Voices Summit: Discussion of Content Moderation, Part I:

Global Voices Summit: Discussion of Content Moderation, Part II:

Global Voices Summit: Discussion of Content Moderation, Part III:

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Reactions from China on Google

"Fauna" at ChinaSMACK has done a valuable public service by hanging out in Chinese forums and translating netizen reaction to Google.cn's relocation to Hong Kong. Read the whole post here. Fauna observes that a lot of comments on the major Chinese web portals have been deleted, leaving up the ones most favorable to the Chinese government and most critical of Google. Keeping one step ahead of the censors - just to capture some of the more nuanced comments before they were deleted proved to be a challenge:

Many Chinese netizen comments have been deleted or hidden and most comments that remain visible clearly support the government or are critical of Google. You can see this in the translated comments from NetEase above.

On KDS, a popular Shanghai BBS discussion forum, I was able to find some comments in support of Google or critical of the government before they were deleted. KDS moderators first deleted posts with many replies before deleting the smaller posts with fewer replies. Many posts were deleted while I was still collecting comments from them.

One of the comments Fauna caught before it disappeared was this one:

"Wumao are rampant, they better secure their overtime pay. What we need is the truth, how are sensitive terms defined? What will not die is whatever TG [The Government] says, that everything that it does not like are sensitive words, keeping the people in the dark.  "

The posting includes this cartoon, which doesn't really require translation:

 

[Translation: "Too f***ing stinky! I'm not f***ing eating with you guys anymore!"]

Will Microsoft's Bing now be content to eat s**t alongside Baidu? Or will they make a serious effort to improve the nutritional value of the Chinese Internet? I asked that question in a column for CNN.com yesterday.

On a related note, China Digital Times has translated orders from the State Council Information Office to news organizations and websites:

All chief editors and managers:

Google has officially announced its withdrawal from the China market. This is a high-impact incident. It has triggered netizens’ discussions which are not limited to a commercial level. Therefore please pay strict attention to the following content requirements during this period:

A. News Section

1. Only use Central Government main media (website) content; do not use content from other sources
2. Reposting must not change title
3. News recommendations should refer to Central government main media websites
4. Do not produce relevant topic pages; do not set discussion sessions; do not conduct related investigative reporting;
5. Online programs with experts and scholars on this matter must apply for permission ahead of time. This type of self-initiated program production is strictly forbidden.
6. Carefully manage the commentary posts under news items.

B. Forums, blogs and other interactive media sections:

1. It is not permitted to hold discussions or investigations on the Google topic
2. Interactive sections do not recommend this topic, do not place this topic and related comments at the top
3. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which attack the Party, State, government agencies, Internet policies with the excuse of this event.
4. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy
5. On topics related to Google, carefully manage the information in exchanges, comments and other interactive sessions
6. Chief managers in different regions please assign specific manpower to monitor Google-related information; if there is information about mass incidents, please report it in a timely manner.

We ask the Monitoring and Control Group to immediately follow up monitoring and control actions along the above directions; once any problems are discovered, please communicate with respected sessions in a timely manner.