Internet & Democracy Blog

Hamid Tehrani at Global Voices has a great primer on what is currently filtered in Iran that is well worth the read. He reports that popular sites like Balatarin and BBC Persian service are top priorities for filtering, and that filtering changes over time, with heavily trafficked sites like YouTube and MySpace getting blocked momentarily but now viewable in Iran–perhaps due to popular demand for those sites within Iran.

I was most surprised, though, to see that the Huffington Post is blocked. Hamid notes that the Huff Post in the past has been quite opposed to Bush and others that were arguing for war with Iran, so I can’t quite figure why that one would be blocked.

And as Kamangir writes (in Persian), use of Herdict by those in Iran could be a good way to use the knowledge of the crowd to understand what is filtered there. I see that Iran is now fourth in the rankings of countries that are reporting through Herdict, which is fantastic, but I’d love to see it at the top of the list!

For those that haven’t seen it yet, below is Obama’s YouTube Nowruz (New Year) message to the people and leaders of Iran. In my opinion, he seems to have gotten the tone just about right. And I found that the use of online video to speak directly to the Iranian people, but also its leaders, a great example of Internet diplomacy. In our research into both the Persian and Arabic language blogospheres, we have found that online resources such as YouTube and Wikipedia are by far the most popular online media sources. Although YouTube has been blocked on and off in Iran, I understand it is currently not blocked. We need more people there to use Herdict and tell us if this is true or not. Obama’s use of YouTube also ensures that he will get a far larger audience than the usual White House press release garners. My only concern, though, is that the media and blogosphere are so focused on Obama’s video that nobody is talking about the death of Iranian blogger Omid Reza Misayafi, which is far too important, and upsetting, of a story to be overlooked.

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I am having trouble expressing how sad and angry I feel over the death of Iranian blogger Omid Rez Misayafi. Bruce’s post this morning announcing it, via Global Voices, left me shaken and upset. I have spent the last hour frantically pouring over the accounts of a writer whom I’ve never met or read (he wrote in Farsi, mostly about traditional Iranian music), but with whom I feel the deepest and most immediate brotherhood. As the Committee to Protect Bloggers put it: “They’ve Killed One of Us.”

I am trying to wrap my mind around how something this cruel and unnecessary could happen. Misayafi, whose chief offense seems to have been a few quickly penned satires, was sentenced in December for insulting religious clerics and opposing the Islamic Republic. That this could merit *two and a half years* in an Iranian gulag, the infamous Evin Prison (listen to this NPR report)… the mind reels in a complex reaction of weary disgust.

The true cause of Misayafi’s death is not yet known. According to official sources, his death was a suicide. Depressed and isolated in prison, the writer simply OD’d on sedatives. Misayafi’s sister is rightly suspicious of this story, especially after the Zahra Kazemi incident. Iranian officials first reported that the detained Canadian-Iranian journalist had died of a stroke while in custody. As it turns out, she was brutally raped, tortured and beaten to death.

Even if Misayafi died by his own hand, he did so under awful conditions and unfair imprisonment. I encourage you to read the statement by Reporters Without Borders, which has demanded a full investigation and detailed autopsy.

Finally, I express my condolences to the Misayafi family. Though you are thousands of miles away, speak another language and come from a different culture, your grief is rawly felt by anyone who believes in free expression. Omid Misayafi, rest in peace.

Former president and leading reformist candidate Mohammad Khatami has decided to back out of Iran’s June 12 presidential election, according to Reuters. Khatami allies said that he decided to withdraw in order to unify the opposition and not split the reformist vote, although he was seen by many as the leading reformist candidate against current President Ahmadinejad. Although he has not stated publicly which candidate he will back, he did meet recently with former Prime Minister Mirhossein Mousavi, another moderate candidate.

As we’ve written here before, during Khatami’s presidency a number of independent newspapers were allowed to open, although they have since been shuttered. Many journalists from that era, such as Sina Motalebi, later moved to the blogosphere but were eventually forced out of the country for their writing. As we have also reported here, it seems that the Iranian government is cracking down on online speech in the lead up to the presidential election, especially opposition elements.

We have just come back from a three day workshop on: “The Internet and Democracy, Lessons Learnt and Future Directions of Research”, which we at Berkman’s Internet & Democracy project have been organizing in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. The workshop gathered around 25 leading academics working in the field in order to investigate:  (1) what are the lessons learnt from existing research? (2) how can we best measure the impact of the Internet and new media on democracy and what are the insights provided by different research methodologies? (3) what are the future directions for the field? The sessions covered an array of topics, with a variety of methodological perspectives.

Day 1
Day one was opened by a public lecture by Matthew Hindman held at the Oxford Said Business School which explored how online audiences are distributed and how site traffic changes over time. The webcast of the lecture will be available online here.
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Against a backdrop of increased repression of bloggers and political speech in Egypt, Ayman Nour, a political rival to Hosni Mubarak, has been released from prison in what most see as a purely political move. Nour was arrested years ago on weak charges after running against Mubarak in the 2005 election. Marc Lynch writes that this his detention was for many democracy activists “the single most potent symbol of Mubarak’s refusal of American pressures on democracy issues.”

Observers tell us not to expect a ‘Cairo Spring’ any time soon, though. The move was likely an attempt to buy good will with the new US administration and Democratic Congress, which was increasingly critical of Nour’s detention. As we wrote here earlier, Nour’s detention was raised as key issue for democracy scholar and new NSC staffer Michael McFaul. Blake Hounshell at Passport reminds us as well that Secretary of State Clinton will arrive soon in Cairo for an official visit, and that Nour’s release could also ease pressures to limit Egypt’s annual military aid package, which will come up again for debate this spring. And as Marc Lynch concludes:

[Nour’s] detention was never the only or even the most significant aspect of the regime’s crackdown on political opposition, which included the arrest of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members, heavy pressures on the press and the judiciary, and much more…His release does not come close to reversing the authoritarian trends in Egypt. I hope that this does not become an excuse to begin ignoring democratic reform, human rights and public freedoms issues in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world.

I’ve been digging into our data on the Arabic language blogosphere lately, so I was drawn immediately to Michael Slackman’s great piece in the Times today on blogging in Egypt. He writes that critics of the government are relatively free to complain about the government and even the security services in Egypt, but that taking any steps towards real world protest will quickly get you into hot water. As Egyptian writer Fahmy Howeidy says in the article, “I call it the freedom to scream. You can say what you want, but you cannot act.”

However, bloggers appear to be treated more harshly for their writing when compared to newspaper reporters. As the Times piece states, “For some reason, as yet unexplained, blogging seems to cross the line from speaking to acting.” This may in part due to self-censorship at newspapers, who know which lines can and cannot be crossed. Slackman writes that criticism of the president, for example, is something newspapers treat carefully while bloggers can attack Mubarak “head-on.”

Many Egyptian bloggers have also been jailed for their writing; over 100 bloggers are facing criminal charges according to Gamal Eid of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information in Cairo. This includes Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, around whom there is a large online movement pressing for his freedom that was started by Esra’a Al Shafei.

It may also be that the large online presence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is illegal in Egypt and whose members, including bloggers, are often arrested and tried before criminal courts, also explains why bloggers are singled out by the government for speech that is otherwise allowed. According to our research, Egypt is a a major part of the Arabic language blogosphere, and we are planning to write a piece exclusively on data around Egypt after our overview case study on the trans-national Arabic blogosphere is completed. Not surprising, the Muslim Brotherhood is a distinct and large group within the Egyptian blogoshere, where we’ve seen they often talk about the arrest of bloggers within their network, freedom of speech and the right to criticize the government. More often, it seems, than the establishment of Islamic law in Egypt. Check back here for more on the Arabic blogsphere, the countries that dominate it, and the media and linking preferences of bloggers who write in Arabic.

Today we had the pleasure of hosting Bahrain digital activist Esra’a Al Shafei, Founder and Executive Director of mideastyouth.com, for a chat about the amazing work of her community to promote “fierce but respectful debate among the diverse youth of the Middle East.” Esra’a started the Web site to increase understanding between Iranians and Arabs, and to move the online debate from one that was primarily a monologue to more of a discussion. She has worked on a number of minority rights and other online campaigns, including for Kurds (she refuses to stop identifying Kurds as from anywhere but ‘Kurdistan’) as well as the Baha’i in Iran. She also was a leader of the well-known Free Karim campaign, which she says she started during a lecture in college, among many other successful online efforts.

Esra’a emphasized that she sees blogging as nice, but is much more convinced by the power of YouTube videos, mashups, cartoons and other visual content to lead to change. Some of the group’s cartoons have been picked up in a number of newspapers in the region, and below is a mashup they made with clips from the movie (and popular graphic novel) Persepolis.

But this one is my favorite, a video of Iranian leaders dubbed over with speeches from Martin Luther King, Jack Kennedy, and Ghandi.

You can catch the full podcast of the talk here, and be sure to check out Mideastyouth.com, which is available in English, Arabic and Persian, and includes contributers from across the Middle East, as well as the US and Canada.

For most of us, Facebook has become a pleasurable if banal ritual: checking wall posts and new pictures, poking an old friend. But in Egypt — where so much speech via traditional media, particularly political speech, is highly regulated and restricted — Facebook is rapidly becoming the mouthpiece of dissent. As Samantha Shapiro explains in this excellent New York Times Magazine piece, groups which oppose the de facto one party rule of Hosni Mubarak are mobilizing protests and debates through social networking technology like Facebook because it is more difficult to control and the audience is instant and diffuse. (Israel’s offensive in Gaza, and Egypt’s quiet response, has generated tremendous resistance, often manifested in Facebook-organized protests.)

Also, as Berkman’s Ethan Zuckerman speculates, Facebook is difficult to ban because it is also a popular source for non-political networking, and so a total site takedown negatively effects the millions of users who until the moment of censorship remainded largely apathetic. This is the so called “cute-cat theory of digital activism,” whereby average users, normally interested in uploading cute cat pictures, suddenly develops a political greivance against the censorsing authority. Egypt it seems contemplated banning the site; the fact they have not yet is remarkable.

The fact that Facebook speech is somewhat freer in Egypt has brought its political currents and opposition parties into greater profile. Of course, the banned Islamist party, the Muslim Brotherhood, figures large in this picture, but the great surprise of the Facebook revolution is how many liberal (the April 6 Movement) or left-leaning parties (like the coalition Kefaya party), however marginal, are joining the debate. This broadening of Egypt’s ideological horizons may be the result of Facebook; or perhaps it’s the other way around, with Facebook being the medium by which the interests and greivances of diverse polities come to the surface. Or, indeed, as Shaprio puts it:

The new technologies and political movements grew symbiotically.

That social networking technology like Facebook tends to produce and simulate an open forum of ideas — or has the potential to do so in spite of the police state’s threats — ought to be taken as a positive sign for emerging democracies where civil society is otherwise lacking. (James Glassman, the State Department’s outgoing undersecretary of public diplomacy has been watching these developments for precisely this reason; for more on Glassman, see my profile here.) Egypt, long stalled between corrupt secularism and Islamic fundamentalism, may find its political situation radically altered by the rise of Facebook literate citizens, ready to blog, question and organize for their causes.

A friend passed on this Haaretz article about how Israel, like Iran, is now recruiting an army of bloggers. Interestingly, however, the Iranian effort seems aimed at influencing opinion internal to the vibrant Iranian blogosphere, while the Israeli project utilizes Israeli citizens with non-Hebrew language skills to debate foreign blogs deemed to be anti-Zionist.

Although I think the trend of governments hiring people to astro-turf is in some ways disturbing, this kind of public affairs spin, or propaganda, is perhaps better debated in a democratic and cacophonous community of bloggers. The message can be analyzed, accepted or rejected as a contributor in a war of ideas. Its excesses can be corrected and its omissions highlighted. May be that is not such a bad thing.