Yesterday I asked the question: does China really feel threatened by U.S. social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube? As usual, I got an education in the comments to the post. While it's true that the Chinese government blocks Twitter, Facebook and all of the main American social media sites, several commenters pointed out they are blocked not because of their popularity (because they aren't, in fact, very popular in China), but due to their degree of freedom. In other words, the more open a social media service is, the more likely it will be blocked in China.
However, perhaps authoritarian governments shouldn't block social media - it may actually be helpful to them!
Sponsor
Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger, presented at TED last year on the topic of How the Net aids dictatorships. In his presentation (embedded below), Morozov makes the contrarian argument that the Internet is actually helping authoritarian governments - more so than being a challenge to them. Morozov asserted that governments like China's have "mastered the use of cyberspace for propaganda purposes."
Morozov noted that in the Iran Twitter protests of June of 2009, services such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs were actually operational and being used by activists. According to Morozov, this was great for the Iranian government - as it enabled them to "gather open source intelligence." The government could identify how Iranian activists connect to each other, by looking at their Facebook pages or Twitter connections.
Kaiser Kuo commented in yesterday's post about the same issue in China:
"...it's astonishing how cavalier some critics of the CCP [China Communist Party] are on Twitter, making no effort to disguise their identities, making their network of friends totally transparent (you can use any of a number of Twitter tools to see the extent of interconnectedness, friend overlap, number of @ messages back and forth, etc) and leaving a completely searchable history. Anyone with a serious anti-CCP agenda would be an idiot to use Twitter."
Also worth noting: Morozov said in his TED talk that cyber-activism may be offset by what he termed "cyber-hedonism." He claimed that people are becoming passive due to the Internet. He said that we often assume that the Internet is going to be the catalyst of change, but it may actually be "the new opium for the masses."
Morozov's theories were challenged in the comments to that TED video. One commenter claimed that "we focus on the obvious totalitarian regimes while our so called democracies use propaganda on a daily basis."
Regardless, Morozov raises some very valid points. While the Web promotes freedom of expression, at the same time it enables authoritarian regimes to monitor their citizens and identify troublemakers.
Let us know your thoughts on this in the comments.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, has embarked on a trip through Africa on behalf of the non-profit Web Foundation - which today announced two new projects.
The Web Foundation exists to bridge the 'digital divide' in Internet usage. Only about 25% of the world population uses the Web today, however more than 70% of people have access to mobile or fixed communication devices capable of displaying Web content. According to the W3C, "the gap in Web usage is partly attributable to the lack of accessible or relatable content, and the lack of available training on how to use the Web to its full potential."
Sponsor
On his African trip, Berners-Lee will visit Kenya, Nairobi and Uganda. There he will meet with government leaders, development workers and educators to help support local Web initiatives - such as improving local health and education.
The Web Foundation was founded in 2008 by Tim Berners-Lee, with the aim of studying the Web and expanding access to the billions of people worldwide who aren't currently online. Today, the Web Foundation launched a fundraising campaign and announced two partnerships.
On the former, Web Foundation CEO Steve Bratt hopes to raise $10-20 million per year, much of which will be put towards programs that train people to use the Web.
One of the partnerships is with the University Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which aims to expedite "re-greening" initiatives throughout the African continent. The other partnership is with the CDI (Center for Digital Inclusion), a social enterprise based in Brazil dedicated to educating disadvantaged youth about information technologies. The Web Foundation and CDI plan to develop training programs to teach young people how to create accessible Web content.
It's interesting to note that many of the Web Foundation initiatives have a big Mobile Web component. In the CDI partnership, Web-based applications are being created that will be "mobile ready." Accessibility is also a key aspect of these projects. The CDI web apps will integrate voice and graphical elements.
In a previous trip to Africa in September, Tim Berners-Lee visited Ghana to meet with officials and educators. He's currently at the 2009 Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt - where he made today's announcements. Starting next week, Berners-Lee will travel to Kenya, Nairobi and Uganda.
We're very pleased to announce the launch of ReadWriteWeb's third country channel: ReadWriteWeb Brazil. It joins our existing two country channels, France and China. ReadWriteWeb Brazil is written in the Portuguese language, one of the world's major languages with up to 230 million native speakers. Brazil has by far the largest online population in Latin America, with an estimated 26.2 Million users of age 15 or more (according to comScore).
Our Brazil channel is edited by Diego Gomes. Diego and his team will combine translation of ReadWriteWeb posts with original posts about Brazil's emerging Web market.
Sponsor
Like the mothership ReadWriteWeb, the Brazil channel will focus on Web trends and products.
The site's original content will cover local businesses and applications, where appropriate comparing them with the rest of the world. The Brazil team is also preparing a series about how web usage in Brazil is completely different from the US and Europe. To find out about the state of the Internet in Brazil, check out the comScore presentation embedded below.
ReadWriteWeb has a natural affinity for the international Web - after all, the company was founded by a New Zealander (yours truly)! For more context about our global strategy, read Bernard Lunn's post Do You Speak Global Innovation?.
RWW Brazil Sponsor Opportunities
ReadWriteWeb Brazil already has two key sponsors, who we'd like to thank here:
UOL HOST, the top .com
domain registrar in Brazil and a provider of quality web hosting, e-commerce, e-mail
marketing and data center services.
PagSeguro, the leading
Brazilian online payments and money transfer service. It allows users
to send and receive payments via e-mail or using credit cards, bank
account transfers or bank payment slip.
If you're a Brazilian Internet company or an international company seeking to reach an influential readership in Brazil, please contact the RWW Brazil editor to find out about their sponsor and partner opportunities.
Brazil's Web Market
We last wrote about the Brazil web market back in September 2006, at a time when Brazilians were 70% of the user base of Google's social network Orkut. We noted at the time that Brazilian Web users had a special affinity for community, which was reflected in the web apps that were popular in Brazil at that time.
For an up-to-date review of Brazil's web market, check out this presentation by comScore:
We're happy to report that energy is high for the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th; in addition to a strong Silicon Valley presence, companies are coming from around the world to participate.
We want to take a moment to highlight five international companies that will be at the Summit. We really appreciate the distance they are traveling to help make this event an important one. You can learn about more highlighted participants signed up so far on this page and you can sign up to join us here.
Sponsor
Here are the international participants we've noted so far, if you're from outside the US and are coming but not on this list, let us know! If your company is interested in learning about sponsorship opportunities, you can email sales@readwriteweb.com.
Faroo (UK)
Faroo is a P2P real-time search engine that combines explicit and implicit data to power its indexing and ranking technologies. The company specializes in difficult real-time analysis of international content, like breaking up long strings of Chinese characters for text analysis. Faroo is also a sponsor of the Real-Time Web Summit, so they are helping it happen as well as helping its international relevance!
PostRank (Canada)
PostRank provides social media analytics on top of traditional web content analytics. We've written about PostRank over and over again here (we're going to again later today) and we use their technology every day. We're very excited that PostRank is going so strong that it's a major sponsor of the Summit as well.
Mendeley (UK)
Mendeley Research Networks is a fascinating real-time citation tracking, recommendation and organization tool for scientific research papers. It's backed by founders of Last.fm and Skype. It's like Last.fm for scientific research. The company believes it is on a pace to have the largest online repository of academic articles in the world sometime next year.
Twingly (Sweden)
Twingly offers blog search, trackback discovery and comment aggregation in real time. The company already has a thriving business providing real-time inbound links for European newspapers and just launched a new product called Twingly Channels this week. (Watch this space for a review later today.)
Some of these companies are bringing multiple representatives and we hope that even more international participants will sign up in the next two weeks leading up to the event. To register to join these companies and many more at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, please visit this link. Feeling unable to make it? Make sure to put the event down on your calendar anyway, we'll be broadcasting select discussion sessions live via Justin.tv. See you on the 15th!
On July 1, the Chinese government will be rolling out censorship software on every new computer sold in the country. The software, called Green Dam Youth Escort, is intended to block pornography and possibly filter politically disruptive material, all while quietly gathering private user data.
One man in particular is staging a protest against the censorship: He is calling for everyone in China to abandon the Internet on the day the new rule takes effect. According to GlobalPost, Beijing artist and prominent political critic Ai Weiwei wants other Chinese citizens to realize their own power.
Sponsor
"I gave almost no explanation about why I'm doing it," said Weiwei, well known as a cultural revolutionary and investigative blogger, to GlobalPost's correspondent. "I just give the structure and people will fill in their own meaning. I don't want to be political first. I wanted to set up an act that everyone can easily accept, and then realize the power later."
Weiwei has a reputation for being a hugely prolific blogger, generating around 3,000 posts in his first three years of writing online. He also uses Twitter, Chinese microblogging service Fanfou, and other sites to spread the word about freedom of expression and overt criticism of the government in China.
On July 1, he is calling for all of China's 300 million Internet users to completely log off for the day. In the original post, even Ai noted, "Chinese people are very practical. They think 'Oh, what's that going to do?'" He is aware the action he's requesting is huge; however, he feels that even a small gesture of protest will have an impact.
In his own words, "A small act is worth a million thoughts."
Given Westerners' sudden bout of green-tinted solidarity with Iranian protesters, we do wonder if Weiwei's call to action (via online inaction) will spread beyond China. What effect do you think Weiwei's protest will have? How can those of us in other countries best express our own disapproval of that nation's censorship policies? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Network analysts Renesys reported this morning that the global effort to supply proxy internet servers for Iranians to route around government control and communicate with the outside world is slowing down and facing increasingly effective state repression. The company mapped two thousand proxy servers shared on Twitter and other web sites over the course of the last week and found that it truly has been a global effort.
It can't be assumed that all the proxies were created to support Iranian protesters, but they were probably all shared for that purpose. Renesys reports that the rate of proxy creation appears to have slumped dramatically over the last few days and newly shared proxies are now being added quickly to the official list of filtered destinations online. This could have consequences for the political movement's global visibility and underlines how important it is for everyday people to create proxies and share them with friends overseas ahead of time.
Sponsor
We were lead to this report by enterprise analyst James Governor, who has consistently uncovered some of the best links to resources regarding Iran.
Renesys offers the following explanation of how proxies work:
A proxy server is a simple bit of software that you run on your computer. It effectively lets you share your computer with anonymous strangers as a "repeater" for content that they aren't allowed to fetch themselves. For example, an Iranian web browser might be manually configured to use your computer (identified by an IP address and a port number) as a Web proxy. When your anonymous friend reads twitter.com, or posts a tweet, the request goes via your computer, instead of to Twitter's web server directly. Except for a little delay, and the fact that your friend gets to see what the uncensored Internet looks like from New York or London or São Paolo instead of Tabriz or Qom, surfing through a proxy is pretty much like surfing without one.
The United States may have offered up more proxies than anywhere else, but the effort has truly been global. "The USA and Western Europe were well-represented, but so were China, India, Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Vietnam," the firm wrote today. "87 countries in all, a pretty impressive breadth of representation, considering the relatively small size of this sample."
Unfortunately the construction of Iran's sophisticated censorship system was a global effort as well; the Wall St. Journal reported this weekend that Siemens and Nokia sold the Iranian government the technology that's being used to track down and silence protesters.
Renesys notes that public sharing of the proxies is making it too easy for the Iranian government to find and control them. The company suggests that it's far better to create proxies and start sharing them with people living under repressive governments ahead of major conflict - "don't wait until the tanks are in the streets to figure this out, because by that point, you may have already lost the proxy war."
If you would like to think ahead and set up a proxy for sharing with friends who could need it, Glype.com is one service you might begin with.
Yesterday I asked the question: does China really feel threatened by U.S. social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube? As usual, I got an education in the comments to the post. While it's true that the Chinese government blocks Twitter, Facebook and all of the main American social media sites, several commenters pointed out they are blocked not because of their popularity (because they aren't, in fact, very popular in China), but due to their degree of freedom. In other words, the more open a social media service is, the more likely it will be blocked in China.
Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger, presented at TED last year on the topic of How the Net aids dictatorships. In his presentation (embedded below), Morozov makes the contrarian argument that the Internet is actually helping authoritarian governments - more so than being a challenge to them. Morozov asserted that governments like China's have "mastered the use of cyberspace for propaganda purposes." 
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, has embarked on a trip through Africa on behalf of the non-profit 
Like the mothership ReadWriteWeb, the Brazil channel will focus on Web trends and products.
The site's original content will cover local businesses and applications, where appropriate comparing them with the rest of the world. The Brazil team is also preparing a series about how web usage in Brazil is completely different from the US and Europe. To find out about the state of the Internet in Brazil, check out the comScore presentation embedded below.
We're happy to report that energy is high for the 
On July 1, the Chinese government will be rolling out censorship software on every new computer sold in the country. The software, called 
Network analysts 
