The Web’s Spread Doesn’t Mean A Freer Internet

This is the story of “Ammar” and his online activities in Tunisia just before the recent fall of the government of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali.  It’s a tale of how social networks, and the spread of the Internet, have come to play a significant role in the life of a nation.

But it may not end how you imagine.

Much has been made recently of how the web is changing the social dynamics in countries around the world – particularly those in the Middle East experiencing unrest.  It’s common now for news reports to highlight the web as a tool for social change, allowing activists to share video, organize protests and build mass movements.   Some have gone even further, adopting terms such as the “Twitter revolution” or the “Facebook revolution.”

Which brings us to “Ammar”.  For years, the government of Ben Ali ran one of the world’s most repressive Internet censorship programs – routinely imprisoning bloggers and slicing off access to large swaths of the Net.  So pervasive was the blocking that Tunisians decided to give the anonymous censors an identity – and “Ammar” was born.

In the weeks leading up to January’s protests, as activists rallied online “Ammar” was quietly busying himself on Facebook.  Specifically, as Alex Madrigal notes in The Atlantic, regime authorities were swapping out identifying information of thousands of Tunisian Facebook users, simultaneously deleting their pages while stealing valuable personal and contact information. The breech compromised thousands of online users, leading to an unknown number of arrests and even a counter-attack by Anonymous.

The government eventually fell, spurred in part by activists’ use of digital media.  However, as the story of “Ammar” demonstrates, what the Internet gives, it can take back as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Is Egypt Blocking  Social Media?  Or Is It Not That Simple?

Friday UPDATE: Shortly before midnight local time on Thursday, Egyptian officials ordered nearly all Internet and mobile phone service shut off across the nation.  Officials at several ISPs and mobile service providers, such as Vodafone, issued statements explaining their actions by order of Egyptian authorities.  Rather than trying to block or slow traffic to specific sites – for example to Twitter or Facebook – it appears authorities have opted for a near-wholesale blocking of digital traffic.  Christopher Williams in The Telegraph explores how such a move affects digital communications in and out of Egypt.

It’s a question that many have been asking lately: would the unrest on display in the streets of Tunisia spread to neighboring states?  This week, we may have begun to learn the answer.

Over the last several days, Egypt has seen some of its worst civil disturbance in years.  Protesters in Cairo have clashed repeatedly with security forces, while in Suez a government building was set on fire.

The disturbances appear to have ebbed somewhat Thursday, but that may only be a temporary pause.  Activists are calling for protests Friday after noon prayers, and Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the IAEA and current Egyptian reform campaigner, said he intends to return from Vienna to join in.

One popular tweet on Twitter regarding the situation in Egypt

Many groups, like the 6th of April Movement, are using Facebook and other social media to organize the protests.  VOA’s Bill Ide notes that while there’s a vigorous debate about just how large a role social media is playing in events, no-one is denying its possibilities.

But are Egyptian authorities so worried about the Internet that they’re blocking parts of it?   Yes, and no.

The Washington Post’s “The Circuit” blog first reported Twitter blocking late Tuesday, and Twitter officials confirmed the reports Wednesday in a tweet.   Facebook meanwhile said as recently as Thursday it does not believe it is being blocked in Egypt.

A tweet from Twitter officials acknowledging their site is blocked in Egypt

However one Egyptian blogger VOA spoke with thinks otherwise.  “That’s a big lie,” said Wael Abbas, author of the popular “misrdigital” blog.  “They started blocking Twitter and Facebook and two opposition newspapers,” he claims, “and one website that we are using to broadcast live video from the streets.”

But the full answer may be more complicated than simply “on” or “off”.  CNet’s “the social” writer Caroline McCarthy points out the wholesale blocking of a website – or even an entire service as recently seen in Cambodia – is a somewhat rough tool.  Quoting Mark Belinksy of the non-profit advocacy group Digital Democracy, a more sophisticated approach is to simply slow down access to some websites so much that users just give up:

“Egypt is going wild and I’m not sure we’ll really have a sense of it until the dust clears,” Belinsky said via e-mail. “Hard to say whether or not it’s just getting overloaded though…(physically severing) Internet was done in Burma after a while but it usually leads to international uproar. What they generally do is slow down the signal to a crawl, as they did in Iran, which they can then say was infrastructure failure or any other made up excuse.”

So what’s really being blocked in Egypt and elsewhere?  Both Twitter and Facebook officials have suggested HerdictWeb as the most up-to-date source on whether sites are being blocked.

A project of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Herdictweb – “the verdict of the herd” – aggregates individual reports of blocked websites  from around the world into one real-time report.  “By crowd-sourcing data from around the world, we can document accessibility for any web site, anywhere,” they claim.

As of 14 hours UTC Thursday, HerdictWeb had logged 57 reports of Twitter being inaccessible from Egypt, and 14 reports that it was.  Compare that to 33 reports of Facebook being blocked, with 37 reports to the contrary.

There are signs other websites are being affected.  Almasry-Alyoum is a popular privately-owned newspaper in Egypt; however as of Thursday VOA access to both its Arabic and English language websites was spotty at best.

And there is a deeper question of whether services like Twitter can ever be fully blocked, even with the resources of a national government.  “Yes, but not very effectively,” writes Joshua Keating in Foreign Policy:

“Unfortunately for the censors, Twitter allows other companies to develop their own applications using its programming interface.  This has led to the development of a plethora of tools that allow users to post to Twitter without ever pointing their browsers to Twitter.com.  These third-party clients still appear to be functioning in Egypt.  There have even been reports of activists updating Twitter through the professional résumé-sharing site LinkedIn.”

It will take time to fully document what Egyptian authorities are or are not doing with the Internet.  However, the story may not end there.    There are new reports the events in Tunisia and Egypt may be inspiring recent protests in Yemen and in Jordan as well.

New Signals that Governments Might Crack Down on the Web

Protests in Tunis, Jan. 19 2011 (photo: AP)

Swiftly moving events in Tunisia continue to challenge headlines’ ability to keep up.   And now come signs that what’s happening there may be presenting challenges in the minds of leaders of neighboring states, and elsewhere as well.

At the recent Arab Economic Summit held in Egypt, the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, warned that other Arab nations may not be too far from the turmoil of Tunisia:

“The recent events in Tunisia are an example of big social shocks that many Arab societies are exposed to,”  he said.  “It is on everyone’s mind that the Arab soul is broken by poverty, unemployment and a general slide in indicators.”

Others need more convincing.  Stephen Walt, writing in Foreign Policy, sees little or no historic evidence that the “contagion” of revolt spreads across borders…despite what he calls the “obvious warning signs” Tunisia presents to other Arab leaders:

“Tunisia’s experience may not look very attractive over the next few weeks or months, especially if the collapse of the government leads to widespread anarchy, violence and economic hardship. If that is the case, then restive populations elsewhere may be less inclined to challenge unpopular leaders, reasoning that ‘hey, our government sucks, but it’s better than no government at all.’”

And it isn’t just Arab leaders that may be nervous.

In a speech last week, long-time Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen sounded off about unnamed foreign sources he suggests are using the Internet to stir up unrest.  In his address Hun Sen warned:

“There is a guy saying that Cambodia should foment a Tunisia style-revolt.  I would like to send you a message that if you provoke or foment a Tunisia style-revolt, I will close the door to beat the dog this time,” he said, adding he would “…beat on the head…” of anyone using the web to incite revolt.

And now a new wrinkle: VOA’s Bun Tharum, in his superb “Musings on Cambodia” blog, has been tracking what might be efforts by the Cambodian government to restrict Web-speech or access to the Internet…at least parts of it.

A screen-grab from ki-media.blogspot.com

KI Media is a dissident blog run on Google’s popular “blogspot” platform from outside of Cambodia.  Long a source of irritation to the government of Hun Sen, access to the site was recently cut off by Cambodia’s three largest ISP’s.  Bun Tharum writes:

“From Tuesday afternoon, web users with service providers AngkorNet, Ezecom and Metfone had no access to KI Media specifically. Users for Ezecom and Metfone also had no access to any blogspot.com platform.

“That means that some bloggers using Google’s Blogger platform have been unable to connect to their sites.

“’Dat’s it,’ tweeted sreisaat, on Thursday. ‘[S]till no accesss to blogspot sites. I’ve a feeling I’ve been singled out for sum reason.’ Her blog, “The Sreisaat Adventures,” is hosted by Blogger and chronicles the everyday life of a Cambodian wife.”

So far a number of Cambodian government officials have denied any involvement in blocking KI or blogspot more generally, while the ISPs have sent conflicting signals – strong denials from one, silence from another, and suggestions a non-committal statement from the third.

The Role the Internet Did – And Didn’t – Play In Tunisia’s Turmoil

Like any revolution, a host of factors can help explain the fall of long-time Tunisian ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.  Faltering economic conditions, decades of autocratic rule and media suppression and a civic culture of corruption and nepotism are but a few.  And as many have noted, the self-immolation of 26-year-old Muhammad Al Bouazizi and resulting public outrage served as something of a catalyst for many of these factors to pour out into the streets.

But before the riots, before Al Bouazizi, even before the economy went sour, Tunisian social media and blogs struggled for years to talk about Tunisia’s ills, identify the causes and perhaps even propose solutions.

The Tunisian public were first given access to the Internet in 1996; it took nearly 10 years for broadband to become available – not so surprising for a poor nation.   But in that time, the government of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali kept an ever-tighter rein on what the public could see, and what they could say, online.

A 2005 Harvard report criticized Tunis for implementing “…an Internet filtering regime that aggressively targets and blocks substantial on-line material on political opposition, human rights, methods of bypassing filtering, and pornography.”   In 2009, the free-speech advocacy group Freedom House ranked Tunisia second worst in the world – ahead of Iran and behind only Cuba – in terms of web freedom.  And the group Global Voices documents 23 Tunisian bloggers who have been harassed, threatened, jailed, and in two cases killed by the Tunisian government.

And yet web culture and social media have rapidly been adopted by the young Tunisian populace.  Most recently online activists used the web to document the various protests across Tunis, and Twitter served as the most reliable news outlet for updates on Al Bouazizi’s condition.  For a time tweets about Tunisia far outpaced those regarding the situations in Sudan or Cote d’Ivoire.

Slim Amamou self-portrait, taken from his Flickr photostream

There’s no question the web has influenced the unfolding events in Tunisia.  And these days, rather than being seen a threat, elements in the new government are seeking to embrace the Internet.  One need look no further than today’s news of the appointment of Slim Amamou – longtime blogger and critic of the government – as Secretary of State for Youth and Sports.  And much in the way the Internet works almost one step ahead, there’s already a Facebook App – “Defender of Tunisia” – where users defend 24 Tunisian cities against government tanks trying to roll back the revolution.

Still, can the Internet be credited with Tunisia’s revolution?  It’s almost a default position among some in Western media to label any contemporary unrest as “a Twitter Revolution.”  But is Twitter really to blame?  And if it happened in Tunisia, where else may the Internet topple a government?

Over at the excellent “Tangled Web” blog (run by VOA’s sister organization RFE/RL) Luke Allnut wonders why journalists hunt for singular  explanations such as Twitter, YouTube or Wikileaks for a process as complex as a national revolution:

“In our search for a single cause, we’re much more likely to settle on an “new technology” explanation rather than something as dull as a great many of the participants were unemployed or wearing socks. Not only do “Twitter revolution” explanations mean more page views, but they fulfill some deterministic urge within us — the dual promises of technology and modernity.”

Ethan Zuckerman writing in Foreign Policy grants that social media “…played a significant role in the events that have unfolded in the past month in Tunisia.”   As an example he details how images from early protests in Sidi Bouzid, ignored by official Tunisian media, moved from Facebook to YouTube to Dailymotion, drawing wider viewership across the nation.  But he cautions:

“…any attempt to credit a massive political shift to a single factor — technological, economic, or otherwise — is simply untrue. Tunisians took to the streets due to decades of frustration, not in reaction to a WikiLeaks cable, a denial-of-service attack, or a Facebook update.”

And in the rush to find a “webby” explanation, journalists may be overlooking more traditional – and thus more boring – media forms.  Inside Tunisia, VOA’s Lisa Bryant spoke with journalists struggling to re-learn a craft long-hobbled by government sanction and punishment.  And former CBS correspondent Tom Fenton, writing in the GlobalPost, credits an external force – Al-Jazeera Television – for “awakening Arab public opinion.”   He writes:

“Its news, talk shows and discussion programs have raised the level of political sophistication of its Arab viewers and increased their reluctance to believe the pronouncements of their own governments. Traditional Arab rulers see it as subversive.  By helping to educate and reshape Arab public opinion, it changed the political landscape and created the mindset that encouraged the overthrow of Tunisian President Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali.”

As unpredictable as they are rare, revolutions result from the interplay of almost impenetrably complex factors and forces.  Answering the questions of “how” and “why” may not be possible.  But if there are answers, they’re likely to be closely examined not just in Tunisia, but in many other nations around the world where leaders fear the next “Twitter” revolution.