Russian InterNYET
Russia did not get started with a great Internet wall when China did. Now it may be too late.
Russians are shunning state-controlled TV for YouTube
When the Soviet people turned on their television sets on August 19th 1991, they knew there was an emergency. Every channel was playing classical music or showing “Swan Lake” on a loop. A few hours earlier Mikhail Gorbachev had been detained during an attempted coup. As the Soviet Union crumbled, the fiercest street battles unfolded over television towers. “To take the Kremlin, you must take television,” said one of Mr Gorbachev’s aides.
Vladimir Putin took note. He began his rule in 2000 by establishing a monopoly over television, the country’s main source of news. It has helped him create an illusion of stability… But the Kremlin’s most reliable propaganda tool is losing its power. Russian pundits have long described politics as a battle between the television and the refrigerator (that is, between propaganda and economics). Now, the internet is weighing in.
According to the Levada Centre, an independent pollster, Russians’ trust in television has fallen by 30 percentage points since 2009, to below 50%. The number of people who trust internet-based information sources has tripled to nearly a quarter of the population. Older people still get most of their news from television, but most of those aged 18-24 rely on the internet, which remains relatively free.
YouTube in particular is eroding the state-television monopoly. It is now viewed by 82% of the Russian population aged 18-44. Channel One, Russia’s main television channel, reaches 83% of the same age group…
News is the fourth-most-popular YouTube category among Russians, after “do it yourself”, music and drama. Mr Navalny, who has become a dominant political voice on the internet, has two YouTube channels, one of which has daily news programmes. In the past year his audience has doubled. He has 2.5m subscribers and 4.5m unique viewers a month. His weekly YouTube webcast is watched live by nearly 1m people. By comparison, Channel One’s main evening news show is watched by 3m-4m people.
The Kremlin is desperately looking for ways to control the internet. “The government is trying to work out how to turn the internet into a television,” says Gregory Asmolov, an expert on the Russian internet at King’s College London. This, he argues, would require not only strict regulation, but control over physical infrastructure and dominance in providing content.
Last month the Duma preliminarily approved a law on “digital sovereignty” which tries to separate Russia’s internet from the global one. It wants to criminalise anti-government messages online, in effect reviving laws on “anti-Soviet propaganda”.
Yet controlling the internet will take more than a few laws. Unlike in China, where the ruling party built its “Great Firewall” by the early 2000s, in Russia the internet was a free zone both in terms of content and infrastructure, with hundreds of private service providers. In the early 2000s it became an alternative to state-dominated television…
[In 2011,] when the Kremlin tried to rig parliamentary elections, sites such as Golos (“Voice”) activated thousands of volunteer election monitors who recorded widespread violations. In the wake of street protests, Mr Putin unleashed repression both online and offline, including denial-of-service attacks on websites, new regulations and prosecution of activists. In 2014 he declared the internet a CIA project and demanded that national internet firms move their servers to Russia. The Kremlin launched groups of “cyber guards” to search for prohibited content, and tried to hollow out the volunteer movement by replicating independent crowdsourcing sites with its own. It even equipped polling stations with webcams, not to increase transparency, says Mr Asmolov, but to create a semblance of it. It also deployed an army of trolls to flood social media with derisive and inflammatory messages…
This heavy-handed approach has alienated young internet users. More recently, the government has changed tactics. Instead of persecuting users, it is establishing greater control over internet providers. New legislation on “digital sovereignty” will oblige them to install surveillance equipment that can be operated from a single control centre. This will allow the state to filter internet traffic, isolate regions or even cut off the worldwide web throughout the country in case of emergency. The government showed it can cordon off individual regions from the internet during recent protests in Ingushetia.
But replicating China’s “great firewall” may be difficult, says Andrei Soldatov, the author of “The Red Web” and an expert on Russian internet surveillance. Russia is more integrated into the internet’s global architecture; its biggest firms, like Yandex, have servers abroad, while global giants such as Google have servers in Russia. More importantly, Russians have grown used to sites like YouTube, which is a big provider of children’s entertainment…
Applying the new law fully, however, might be like smashing a computer screen with a hammer. The Kremlin will have a switch to bring down the internet if a political crisis erupts, but few ways to prevent it from erupting. Pulling the plug to block the protesters’ message from spreading would be the most powerful message of all. In 1991 almost no one had internet access. But everyone knew the country was in turmoil when they turned on the television and saw nothing but “Swan Lake”.
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Labels: censorship, political culture, politics, Russia, social media
Elections and social media in Mexico
Some people in Mexico are serious about exposing online political manipulation.
Mexico election: Concerns about election bots, trolls and fakes
Political parties in Mexico are using bots and fake accounts in an attempt to influence voter behaviour and in some cases spread false stories ahead of the country's presidential elections on 1 July, according to researchers, journalists and activists…
Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher with Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, has been tracking automated accounts, or bots, which attempt to manipulate public opinion by boosting the popularity of social media posts.
But there are other tricks deployed in aid of politicians. "Troll farms"… are run by actual humans, each of which might control dozens or hundreds of accounts. And often accounts are semi-automated, pumping out messages with a mix of computer power and human know-how…
In a paper published in 2017, Bradshaw along with researcher Philip Howard, concluded that government-sponsored "spam-bots" were used in Mexico to "target journalists" and "spread misinformation".
"These bots are often used to flood social media networks with spam and fake news. They can also amplify marginal voices and ideas by inflating the number of likes, shares and retweets they receive, creating an artificial sense of popularity, momentum or relevance," the researchers wrote…
The previous use of bots and the upcoming election has concentrated the attention of the public and activists on online trickery.
Alberto Escorcia, founder of the blog Lo Que Sigue ("What's Next"), says that although the use of bots for political purposes has been detected in Mexico since at least 2010, this type of activity has intensified in recent years…
Although the PRI has been the focus of much of the attention of the researchers, both Bradshaw and Escorcia agree that online tricks haven't been limited to one party. All the main political parties in the country are using bots in their current campaigns, they say.
However the main political parties, including the PRI, have consistently denied they are using bots…
The bots and trolls are spreading political messages, but there's a more fundamental concern - that they are seeding the web with false news stories.
As a response, more than sixty Mexican media outlets, universities and NGOs formed an anti-fake news initiative called Verificado 2018.
Verificado is encouraging people to send them stories on social media using the hashtag #QuieroQueVerifiquen, or "I want you to verify this." The organisation's researchers will then fact-check and publish their findings.
"In this election we are finding a lot of bots that are being used in order to promote or to attack other candidates," says Yuriria Avila, a Verificado 2018 fact-checker." "We're seeing bots are being used to promote hashtags that people wouldn't naturally use, and they become trending topics."
One piece of false news she detected in March was a report that said an opinion poll commissioned by The New York Times showed Meade - the PRI candidate - leading the presidential race with 42% of voters behind him.
The poll was fictional; most polls have instead consistently shown Meade trailing third in the race…
Avila says that a number of false stories are being shared through the messaging app Whatsapp, and because of the closed nature of that system, they have been among the most challenging things to track and debunk…
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Labels: elections, Mexico, social media
Protest messages on money
It seems as if protesters find new methods of expression as often as the Iranian government shuts down avenues of protest.
Iranians launch banknote protest to get round censorship
"Banknotes are our un-censorable messengers," one user wrote, referring to a rumoured plan to permanently block the popular messaging app Telegram, which is by far the most popular digital communication tool in Iran.
Slogans included "I am an overthrower".
Some of the sayings were originally chanted during mass anti-establishment protests at the turn of the year.
In late December, demonstrators took to the streets then to express their dissatisfaction with the social and economic situation in the country.
Telegram was believed to have been the main platform people used to obtain and share information about the protests, which took place across Iran from late December 2017 to January 2018.
Nearly 8,000 tweets have been posted since 28 April under the hashtag #Onehundredthousand_talking_banknotes in Persian, according to BBC Monitoring. Most posts are aimed at raising awareness about the new online movement…
Most tweets were posted anonymously, making them hard to independently verify…
One account… published a photograph of a note featuring a drawing of a protester in a hijab - a tribute to the recent "Girls of Enqelab (Revolution) Street" movement against the compulsory Islamic dress code in the country…
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Labels: Iran, politics, protest, social media
Winnie (not in China)
This reminds me of the political jokes that used to come out of the Soviet Union — published in
mimeographed samizdat and smuggled out from behind the
Iron Curtain.
Why China censors banned Winnie the Pooh
The blocking of Winnie the Pooh might seem like a bizarre move by the Chinese authorities but it is part of a struggle to restrict clever bloggers from getting around their country's censorship…
Winnie the Pooh has joined a line of crazy, funny internet references to China's top leaders.
The Chinese name for and images of the plump, cute cartoon character are being blocked on social media sites here because bloggers have been comparing him to China's president.
When Xi Jinping and Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe endured one of the more awkward handshakes in history netizens responded with Winnie the Pooh and Eeyore shaking hands…
It is not only that China's censors will not tolerate ridicule of the country's leader, they do not want this beloved children's character becoming a kind of online euphemism for the Communist Party's general secretary.
In other countries such comparisons might be thought of as harmless enough and some might even think that having Winnie as your mascot could even be quite endearing: not in China.
Here the president is "Mr Grey." He doesn't do silly things; he has no quirky elements; he makes no mistakes and that is why he is above the population and unable to be questioned…
Winnie the Pooh has actually fallen foul of the authorities here before. This renewed push against online Pooh is because we are now in the run-up to the Communist Party Congress this autumn.
The meeting takes place every five years and, amongst other things, sees the appointment of the new Politburo Standing Committee: the now seven-member group at the top of the Chinese political system.
Xi Jinping will also be using the Congress, which marks the beginning of his second term in office, to further solidify his grip on power by promoting allies and sidelining those seen as a threat…
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Labels: censorship, China, leadership, politics, social media
A firm hand by Iran
By its own account the Iranian government is going to great lengths to control social media. Especially social media used by younger people. Can it work there better than it does in China?
Iran bans 14 thousand websites and accounts weekly
Iranian Prosecutor Ahmad Ali Montazeri, who presides the Internet censorship Committee in the country, has banned and closed 14 thousand websites and social networking accounts in Iran.
In an interview with al-Khabar Iranian channel on Tuesday, Montazeri stressed that the main reason behind this decision was the content of these websites and pages that was “against the religion and ethics.”
Montazeri added: “we are under an attack targeting our religious and national values by foreign channels and hostile networks.”…
Security forces announced the arrest of young active men and women who were spotted by the “internet army” as organizing online catwalks on Instagram.
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China's firewall
The firewall is political. It's becoming more effective.
The Internet was supposed to foster democracy. China has different ideas.
It is part of China’s larger effort to… disprove the notion that the flow of ideas across the World Wide Web would be an unstoppable force toward democracy. News and information that might threaten the Communist Party are kept out of the country under a system of censorship known as the Great Firewall, while foreign social-media networks such as Facebook and Twitter that allow private citizens to share ideas and join forces are also banned. Behind the wall, China’s own social-media networks are closely policed to ensure public opinion does not coalesce into a threat to one-party rule…
Indeed, social media is increasingly being harnessed by autocratic regimes to bolster their rule, says University of Toronto political scientist Seva Gunitsky. It helps dictatorships gauge public opinion and discover otherwise hidden grievances, while also allowing them to disseminate propaganda and shape the contours of public debate.
“China has been at the forefront of this, and they are quickly getting very sophisticated about it,” he said. “Social media can allow autocrats to become stronger, more informed and more adaptable…
Censors work selectively, especially targeting posts that threaten to spur some form of collective action. Pro-government voices generally do not engage critics in discussion or argument… but do often subject them to personal attack…
Ordinary citizens, meanwhile, were warned off with a threat of up to three years in jail for spreading rumors if their posts were viewed more than 5,000 times or reposted 500 times.
Real-name verification was introduced for social-media accounts, while the government warned Internet giant Sina last year to intensify its own censorship of online comments…
Broadening the campaign, China’s Internet regulator told news websites on June 21 to crack down on online comment sections, cleaning up comments that violated what are described as “nine don’ts and seven bottom lines,” including endangering state security, challenging socialism and inciting ethnic hatred…
Some posters are popularly believed to be paid — the “wumao” (the 50-cent Party) who are supposedly given half a renminbi ($0.08) for every post praising the government or denigrating its critics.
But a much larger number may just be employees of the state, doing part-time work outside their main jobs to support the party’s agenda.
Various arms of the Chinese government, together with individual state employees, by their own admission operate more than 150,000 official Weibo [a government-approved version of Twitter] accounts, but the real number of accounts run by state employees could be far higher…
Others are volunteers, reportedly recruited by the Communist Youth League in the millions to spread “positive energy” and “civilize” the Internet…
True believers could come from a new breed of young people, brought up after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, who are proud of China’s rising global power and suspicious of Western criticism as an attempt to block its rise…
President Xi says he wants an Internet that is “clear and bright” but in April told leaders of the country’s top Internet companies, as well as officials and academics, that he did not want to shut down criticism entirely.
Indeed, he called for “more tolerance and patience” toward netizens and said he welcomed online criticism “whether mild or fierce,” as long as it arises from goodwill, the People’s Daily reported.
Authorities then apparently censored negative reactions to his speech on social media…
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The Comparative Government and Politics Review Checklist.
Two pages summarizing the course requirements to help you review and study for the final and for the big exam in May. . It contains a description of comparative methods, a list of commonly used theories
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Labels: censorship, China, Internet, politics, social media
Talk amongst yourselves
Well, get your students to talk to each other as they evaluate Thomas Friedman's analysis of the state of democracy in the 21st century. He's discussing illiberal democracies, transitions to post-industrial economies, and the roles of social media.
It might be interesting to have students discuss these ideas as an introductory lesson. (Take notes.) And then have them evaluate the ideas again at the end of the course. (Compare discussions.)
Takin’ It to the Streets
Why are we seeing so many popular street revolts in democracies?… Former C.I.A. analyst Paul R. Pillar… asks: “The governments being protested against were freely and democratically elected. With the ballot box available, why should there be recourse to the street?”
It is an important question, and the answer, I believe, is the convergence of three phenomena. The first is the rise and proliferation of illiberal “majoritarian” democracies…
 |
| Istanbul protest |
What the protesters in Turkey, Russia and Egypt all have in common is a powerful sense of “theft,” a sense that the people who got elected are stealing something more than money: the people’s voice and right to participate in governance…
A second factor is the way middle-class workers are being squeezed between a shrinking welfare state and a much more demanding job market. For so many years, workers were told that if you just work hard and play by the rules you’ll be in the middle class. That is just not true anymore…
Finally, thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, Twitter, Facebook and blogging, aggrieved individuals now have much more power to engage in, and require their leaders to engage in, two-way conversations — and they have much greater ability to link up with others who share their views to hold flash protests…
The net result is this: Autocracy is less sustainable than ever. Democracies are more prevalent than ever — but they will also be more volatile than ever…
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Labels: civil society, concepts, democratization, illiberal democracy, post-industrial economy, social media
Just The Facts! 2nd edition is a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
