In September 2012, the trailer for the film The Innocence of Muslims shot to infamy after spending the summer as a mercifully obscure video in one of YouTube’s more putrid backwaters.

Protests against the Innocence of Muslims film took place around the world

Since then, there has been much handwringing amongst American intellectual, journalistic, and political elites over whether the US Constitution’s First Amendment protections of freedom of expression should protect this sort of incendiary speech, or whether Google, YouTube’s parent company, acted irresponsibly and endangered national security by failing to remove or restrict the video before provocateurs across the Islamic world could use it as an excuse to riot and even kill.

Supporters of internet censorship argue that posting The Innocence of Muslims online is the equivalent of yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre. The analogy is not entirely off-base – the director of the video hoped to provoke violent reactions to his work. But we make a mistake if we focus on the man yelling fire and not on the crowded theatre.

The Innocence of Muslims was successful in sparking violence not because it was a particularly skillful – or even especially offensive – piece of filmmaking. Instead, it had a dramatic impact because it was useful to a small group who benefitted from a violent response, and because it exploited the ugly tendency of media outlets to favour simple narratives about violence and rage over more complex ones.

Increasing censorship in the name of fighting hate speech will do nothing to address the broader environment in which hate is incubated and nurtured.

Even if the US had a more narrow interpretation of the First Amendment, or if YouTube and other internet companies had more expansive definitions of ‘hate speech’, combined with more aggressive censorship practices, that would not have solved the more deep-seated problems which made it so easy for people – most of whom had never even seen the video – to riot outside the US embassy in Cairo. And any number of offensive videos or web pages could have served the authors of violence as a convenient flashpoint.

The danger of increased control of online speech is that we will not guarantee the elimination of flashpoints of violence, but we will almost surely make it a more difficult environment for those who use the internet to reduce hate and increase understanding. But if the argument for free speech is to be won, we must make more concerted and deliberate efforts to strengthen the world’s immunity against the virus of hate – both on social media and in the mainstream media.

From obscurity to widespread outcry

To understand why online censorship would not have reduced the broader threat of extremist attacks, we need to look at how this obscure video found an audience. On 1 July 2012, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an Egyptian-American Coptic Christian with a criminal past that includes defrauding banks and cooking methamphetamine, posted a 14-minute trailer for The Innocence of Muslims using the pseudonym Sam Bacile.

Actors were recruited to feature in a film called Desert Warriors; its script was about battles between warring tribes provoked by the arrival of a comet. After filming on the project was complete, the film was awkwardly dubbed with lines about the Prophet Mohammed that portrayed him as a sex-obsessed, violent paedophile.

Nakoula hoped the film would find an audience among Muslims living in southern California – it is unclear whether he thought his film would persuade them to question their faith or whether he hoped to provoke an angry public response. Though he took out an advertisement in an Arabic language newspaper and rented a small cinema for a screening, he was unable to persuade more than a handful of people to watch the film. He had similar luck after he posted the trailer on YouTube, where it garnered only a few thousand views over the course of several weeks.

The video didn’t reach a wider audience until it was championed by two vocal opponents of Islam, Pastor Terry Jones and Coptic activist Morris Sadek. Jones and Sadek both have long records of anti-Islamic provocation. Jones is best known for launching ‘International Burn a Quran Day’ on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, leading to protests in the US and abroad, widespread media coverage and meetings between Jones and senior US officials.

Pastor Terry Jones was largely responsible for the dissemination of The Innocence of Muslims

While Jones was persuaded to cancel International Burn a Quran Day, he has subsequently burned the holy book on different occasions. And The Innocence of Muslims gave the pastor a talking point for his latest publicity stunt, ‘International Judge Mohammed Day’, which he had scheduled for 11 September 2012.

Morris Sadek, who is head of the National American Coptic Assembly and frequently sends out emails denigrating Islam, is well known among the Coptic community in the US and Egypt. He posted Nakoula’s film, with Arabic subtitles, on the organisation’s website and sent hundreds of emails promoting the video to colleagues in Egypt.

Whether through Sadek’s actions or other means, The Innocence of Muslims came to the attention of Egyptian TV host Sheikh Khaled Abdullah. Abdullah appears on al Nas Television, a satellite channel based in Cairo, known for its conservative Islamic stance. Sheikh Abdullah is fond of telling his viewers that the US is at war with Islam, and Nakoula’s video fit in perfectly with this viewpoint.

When the video was shown on al Nas, dubbed into Arabic, it was impossible to tell that the English-language audio had been cut and pasted together. Abdullah and other commentators also implied that the film had been sponsored or supported by the US government and shown on “state television” in the States. Al Nas is watched throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Audiences in Egypt responded to the broadcast by protesting at the American embassy in Cairo on 11 September.

The 11 September rocket attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which led to the death of US Ambassador Christopher Stephens and three other Americans, was, at the time, also viewed as an act of retaliation against the film. However, it has since been reported that the Benghazi attack was the work of violent extremists, not members of the general public, who took advantage of the unfolding chaos in Cairo as a suitable catalyst for their own attack.

Some reports, including a 19 October article in the Los Angeles Times, maintain that there is not sufficient evidence to suggest the attack was planned. What is clear, however, is that violent protests against the film spread, from Cairo to Dhaka, Karachi, Kabul and elsewhere.

To a Western viewer, it may be obvious that the film was made solely to provoke an angry reaction, but it was less obvious when the trailer was dubbed and presented as a new film for American audiences. Given understandable resentment towards American military engagement in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a steady narrative from commentators like Sheikh Khaled Abdullah that America is at war with Islam, it is not hard to see how some Muslims took the film seriously and rose to the provocation.

Violent protests were, of course, what Nakoula, Jones and Sadek wanted. Given that Jones and Sadek argue that Islam is a dangerous religion, the burning of the Benghazi embassy represents a victory. The violent protests may have been what Sheikh Abdullah wanted as well, given his calls for Muslims to fight against perceived slights to Islam.

‘Don’t feed the trolls’

In internet terminology, Nakoula, Sadek and Jones are essentially trolls. Trolls attempt to hijack a discussion through harassment or inflammatory content, hoping to provoke an emotional response. The troll ‘wins’ when discussions descend into virtual shouting matches. Over time, those who regularly write and read blogs, or participate in discussions on social media, have developed some resistance to trolls.

Recognising that trolls feed on attention and that often their satisfaction is directly proportional to the unnecessary conflict they are able to create, it is common for moderators of online platforms to greet newcomers with the warning ‘Don’t feed the trolls’ – in other words, if someone is trying to incite you, don’t bother responding, as your angry attention is exactly what the troll wants.

Censoring trolls rarely succeeds – they tend to return, even more disruptive than before, using new monikers. Instead, the best way to silence trolls is to ignore them.

The broader global information ecosystem, however, has not developed robust defences against trolls. In all corners of the world, media outlets seeking to boost audiences through titillation and controversy have effectively built troll-baiting and troll-feeding into their business models. TV stations like al Nas profit from them. Commentators like Sheikh Khaled Abdullah gain power by inciting their followers to react emotionally and even violently to trolls.

The Innocence of Muslims can be seen as a targeted attack designed to exploit the predispositions of our media systems. If some media in the Middle East are actively searching for evidence that the US is persecuting Muslims, the US media since 9/11 has also paid disproportionate attention to violence committed by Muslims.

Malaysia Muslims protest Innocence of Muslims film

Protests in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan and elsewhere played into an existing narrative for American news outlets, a narrative best illustrated by Newsweek’s 24 September issue, dedicated to the topic of ‘Muslim Rage’ and featuring a tightly-cropped image of men in turbans with saliva-flecked beards yelling with upraised fists.

The fact that violent insurgents were able to use the protests as an opportunity to carry out an attack, the plans for which had probably already been laid out, of course fed into and fuelled the narrative.

The trolls behind The Innocence of Muslims exploit both of these predictable narratives. They provide Middle Eastern Muslims with evidence that Americans misunderstand and disrespect Islam so badly that hundreds of people were willing to get together and make a film insulting the Prophet.

The ensuing protests play to the American commercial media’s focus on the sudden and violent reactions, at the expense of processes that may be more important but are hard to portray visually: the authoring of a Libyan constitution, peaceful elections in Egypt.

Newsweek’s cover invites us to see the Libyan protest the way Nakoula and Pastor Jones see it, as evidence that Islam is unpredictable and violent. Other perspectives tell a different story.

Marc Lynch, a leading scholar of Arab media, points out that the protests, while sometimes violent, ‘were actually quite small – vastly inferior in size and popular inclusion to the Arab uprising protests last year and small even in comparison to the ongoing pro-democracy or other political demonstrations which occur on a weekly basis in many Arab countries’.

One protest that was not widely reported took place on 21 September, ten days after the consulate was destroyed, ‘where tens of thousands came out in Benghazi in an inspiring rally against militias and against the attack on the US consulate’. A day later, similar rallies ousted the Ansar al Sharia militia, believed to have set the US consulate on fire, from their base near the city. While dozens of op-ed writers picked up their pens to opine on Muslim rage, Lynch notes, few have been inspired to write about these massive rallies in support of the US.

In a YouTube video that offers a very different view, footage by Libyan activist Fahd al Bakoush reveals a dozen men carrying Ambassador Stephens, unconscious from smoke inhalation, out of the burning consulate to a car to take him to the hospital.

When the men discover Stephens is still alive, they chant ‘God is Great’. Tens of thousands of Benghazi residents marched against one manifestation of ‘Muslim rage’.

At the same time, many American Muslims reacted to the Newsweek cover by laughing at it. It invited people to share their thoughts online, using the Twitter hashtag #Muslimrage. Hundreds of Muslims in the US and elsewhere did so, posting pictures of themselves looking mildly annoyed, with captions depicting their ‘rage’ at the frustrations of ordinary life.

Some of these photographs, collected on tumblr.com, feature captions like: My bookmark fell out and now I have to page through to find my spot. #MuslimRage kebabs burning! why my timer didn’t go off? #MuslimRage 3-hour lecture tomorrow at 8 am. Why. #MuslimRage The #Muslimrage tweets sent a clear message: violent protesters represented an infinitesimal fraction of the nearly two billion Muslims worldwide.

Newsweek’s attempt to create an angry dialogue around the topic wasn’t worth engaging with, except to poke fun at it. With marches in Benghazi and tweets from the US, many Muslims are trying to fight a simplistic narrative that makes it hard to see and understand a larger transformation that is taking place in the Middle East – a move from a world of oppressive autocrats and suppressed religious movements to representative governments that strive to balance moderate Islam and electoral democracy.

Many were unable to see the smiling and sarcastic #Muslimrage because they were so blinded by the overblown and violent ‘Muslim rage’ suggesting that that their primary sources of information about the world are giving them a distorted picture – with plenty of help from political leaders across the Muslim world who stand to benefit politically in taking an anti-US and anti-Western stance.

This amplification of some narratives over others, causing cosmopolitan, disparate Muslim voices to be muted in favour of extremists, feeds and empowers ‘trolls’ and those who profit from them. The result is a vicious and often deadly cycle of reactions and counter-reactions.

Finding another way

The solution to this problem is not censorship. Trolls must be exposed for what they are if they are to be disempowered – not only on the internet but throughout the world’s media and political systems. But trolls succeed only because they understand the workings of media well enough to exploit it. The real solution is to build a media that is better at providing context and showing proportionality, so we can see just how marginal figures like Nakoula and Jones really are.

A global anti-troll movement is building itself through skilled and innovative use of the internet. In the vanguard are articulate, multi-lingual, multi-cultural individuals who can translate and contextualise global events from the perspective of people who have the most to lose when the power of trolls and troll-enablers goes unchecked.

These cosmopolitan figures need to be empowered, their voices amplified. They are people like Mahmood al Yousif, a Bahraini entrepreneur who started one of the Persian Gulf’s first dial-up online bulletin board discussion groups in 1986. He has since run a number of websites, including one of the most influential English-language blogs in the Gulf since 2003. His goal is to ‘dispel the image that Muslims and Arabs suffer from – mostly by our own doing I have to say – in the rest of the world,’ he explains. ‘I run several internet websites that are geared to do just that, create a better understanding that we’re not all nuts hell-bent on world destruction.’ In the discussion section attached to a post in which he condemned the consulate attack in Benghazi as ‘a heinous act and completely inhuman’, he opined: ‘Something very drastic and fundamental must change in how we interpret our religion for us not to continue to have morons continue their massacres in its name.’

How mainstream or marginal is a voice like al Yousif’s in mainstream Arab media? On a network like al Jazeera, which specialises in spirited dialogues between commentators with opposing viewpoints, it is not uncommon to hear a voice like his as one pole in a discussion. But generally, reasoned moderation and tolerance makes for boring television. It is easier to amplify angry and marginal voices, even if millions of Muslims around the world agree with al Yousif’s viewpoint.

In 2004, when we launched Global Voices, an international citizen media platform and community, one of our core goals was to amplify voices like Mahmood’s. Editors and volunteer contributors curate, translate and add context to blogs and social media around the world. This community has agreed to deliberately emphasise and amplify online citizen reports, viewpoints and conversations that receive little if any attention in the mainstream global English-language media.

This community of several hundred authors and translators – most of them multi-lingual, many of whom have lived in different countries and cultures – are working hard every day to build bridges across vast gaps of understanding and discourse about global events. Despite religious, cultural, and political differences among them, all members of the community share a belief in the importance of freedom of speech, but also in civility.

The Global Voices Manifesto concludes: ‘We believe conversation across boundaries is essential to a future that is free, fair, prosperous and sustainable – for all citizens of this planet.’ To that end, in late September the Global Voices community produced a range of blog posts covering reactions in different countries to The Innocence of Muslims video and subsequent protests.

One post republished tweets and photos by Benghazi resident Ahmed Sanalla, who reported on a protest against the deadly attack on the US Consulate. ‘Thugs & killers don’t represent #Benghazi nor #Islam. Image from today’s protest in #Benghazi’, he reported in one tweet, linking to a photo of the protest sign. Other postings covered online debates in Indonesia, Pakistan and a number of other countries about whether the film deserved the attention it had provoked and whether it made sense for their governments to censor YouTube.

One post, entitled ‘Arab World: Outrage Over Killing of US Ambassador in Benghazi’ by Middle East/North Africa Editor Amira al Hussaini featured an assortment of English and Arabic reactions. One of her translations, an Arabic tweet by Egyptian writer, proclaimed sarcastically: ‘The attack on the embassy in Libya will have a huge impact and will change the result of the elections in a way which will not benefit Arabs and Muslims. Congratulations for the terrorism we enjoy!’

There is no shortage of thoughtful commentary online that criticises violence and urges increased understanding. But it is very hard to attract public attention to these points of view. Building a new sort of global discourse where reasonable majorities have a louder voice than extremists and trolls is a mighty task. It will require investment of resources by many people and organisations around the world that believe not only in free speech but also that the status quo is dangerous.

Internet and media companies, software and web development communities and civil society must come together in a shared commitment to defuse the power of trolls and to amplify cosmopolitan discourse. We propose a concrete first step in that direction: a tool to provide better context.

Nakoula’s video was so powerful in its incitement of violence because it was taken out of context and presented as a popular film shown on national television, not as the obscure piece of trash it was. Protests around the Muslim world reinforced a narrative of ‘Muslim rage’ because western media didn’t show them in the context of larger ongoing protests against corruption and crime, or even in contrast to larger demonstrations against extremism.

The solution to offensive content on the internet isn’t censorship but context. Below every video on YouTube viewers are able to post comments. Many popular or controversial videos evoke video responses. Type ‘Innocence of Muslims’ into the YouTube search box and there are hundreds of videos posted in response to the video.

Some of the responses from around the world are as hateful as the original video, but others are thoughtful, condemning both the filmmaker and the people who reacted violently to it. Dallas-based imam Nouman Ali Khan, for example, offered a moving video response that urged Muslims to feel pity for the makers of the video and their ignorance, not anger.

But while YouTube provides a platform for discussion and reaction to content, these conversations are themselves easily hijacked by trolls. YouTube does not help contextualise controversial content, or neutralise its inflammatory nature by exposing and condemning the conditions under which it was created, or the way in which it is being used.

The site could offer an explanation about the controversy, making it more difficult for al Nas to claim that The Innocence of Muslims was a mainstream – even state-sanctioned – production. YouTube could offer its users options to click through to further information and discussion. People could then click to a regularly-updated page on which editors collect relevant news stories and blog posts about the film’s origins and global reactions to it.

It could also offer visualisations showing what other sorts of websites, blogs, and tweets are linking to it, revealing who is influenced by or amplifying that particular piece of content – and what they are saying. These pages could also be translated into the most relevant languages. YouTube could hire a rapid-response editorial staff to build such pages around controversial content.

Yet one could argue that placing such editorial responsibilities in Google’s hands concentrates too much power over the public discourse. Furthermore, by assuming an active editorial function to its platform, YouTube would weaken its legal argument – often made in response to censorship demands – that it is a mere conduit for user content and thus cannot be held legally responsible for speech.

It might make most sense for the editorial team and rapid-response page to be part of a separate organisation, hosted on web pages that YouTube links to but does not own or control. There is a precedent for this: when Google and Twitter are compelled by court order or copyright take-down notice to remove content, they display a link from the page where that content once resided to the third-party non-profit website Chilling Effects, which serves as a repository for the legal documents behind a censorship demand.

Similarly, a third-party organisation run by skilled editors, bloggers, web developers, media researchers and translators could be entrusted make independent decisions about which YouTube content (and other social media content as well) most urgently requires the creation of a page offering more information about its broader context and public responses.

This is only one of many possible ways to add context to online speech. Whether platforms like YouTube tackle the challenge directly, or partner with others to contextualise their content, if free speech is to be successfully defended, the world desperately requires media and innovations that will neutralise destructive trolls such as the ones who created, promoted, and exploited The Innocence of Muslims.

Rebecca MacKinnon is a blogger and co-founder of Global Voices Online. She is notable as a former CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo. She tweets from @rmack

Ethan Zuckerman is an American media scholar, blogger, and co-founder of Global Voices Online. He is the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media. He tweets from @EthanZ

This article appears in Digital Frontiers. Click here for subscription options and more

The post Don’t feed the trolls appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Below is an excerpt of the book, in which Hogge interviews Ethan Zuckerman, long-time fellow and researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and co-founder of international blogging community Global Voices Online.

“The reason I think internet freedom is interesting and potentially useful,” Ethan explains, “Is not because I believe some sort of Marxist-Leninist revolution is round the corner based on IT. If anything, I think a sort of an Anglo-American revolution might be long around the corner.”

For a moment, I have no idea what he is talking about. Ethan smiles at me. “I mean when we broke free of your shackles, through the long arduous public debate process of trying to figure out what a better government would be than the lousy one we had.” I realise he’s talking about the 18th century. I feel slightly embarrassed, but Ethan lets it go with a wave of his hand.

Ethan is worried that the virtual places we’re creating online to foster such a debate are not what they seem. “That forces us to think about how we create public spaces. [With the web] we think we have a free and open space to communicate in. Well maybe we don’t. Because it is owned and controlled, and because of that it’s possible that certain types of speech actually get very difficult.”

When the WELL went online, the internet was very much a network of ends, and for that reason people believed that the ‘net, and later the web, had a radical potential to refresh public discourse. No longer would debate be led by media oligopolies brokering access to a one-way pipe. The consolidation of media, epitomized by Rupert Murdoch’s News International empire, could not happen over this network. Or so went the theory.

In fact today, according to a company called Arbor Networks who have access to a significant majority of the world’s internet traffic, about 60% of all web traffic terminates at about 150 companies, and about 30% of all web traffic terminates at about 30 companies. 6% of web traffic is the result of just one company: Google. Consolidation in cyberspace has already happened, and in a remarkably shorter time frame than the consolidation of print and broadcast media. Just like our local high street, a once-thriving marketplace of independent ventures is being taken over by familiar and deodorised corporate giants – Facebook, Yahoo!, Amazon, YouTube. How has this happened?

“The rhetoric of the internet early on was this massively decentralised network where every point routes to every point,” Ethan explains. “It doesn’t matter if you cut the wires, it will re-route
around it and everything is sort of an independent end node, right? Technically things are fairly independent as end nodes. You can do ludicrous things with just a PC attached to this network. And the whole rise of peer-to-peer [filesharing] demonstrates how ludicrous you can be just doing peers.

“The first thing to note is that it’s nowhere near as resilient as we promised ourselves it was. You know, when a cable goes down in west Africa it has very real, very significant consequences. But what turns out to be most interesting, at least for me, is that we thought all the services would be at the edge of the networks. Which is to say lots of people would have their own web servers under their control, their own mail servers under their control. And what’s been happening gradually over about 15 years is everyone has said, ‘that’s really a pain in the ass and I really don’t want to do that.’”

Much like the sixties communards who gave up farming the land after one season showed them how hard it was, communicatory self-sufficiency turned out to be a bit of a drag. “I think it changed first because of spam,” Ethan says. “Basically, if you run your own mail server these days the amount of time you have to spend training your spam filter is just insane. And so I would say 80% of the sort of hardcore geeks I know just moved over to Gmail, and have just sort of said, ‘It’s fine. You know? Yes, now Google controls my email. If I really am worried about it I can always encrypt on top of it, but the pain I’m going through to maintain my own mail server just isn’t worth it anymore’.” Ethan and I both use Gmail.

“After that,” Ethan continues, “we started to see consolidation of web hosting. And similarly that’s more of a cost issue. Web traffic is really spikey. And what you really want to do is to be able to turn up the bandwidth to your server. Or potentially put another server in if you’re having a good day and suddenly everyone’s paying attention to you. That’s really hard to do if you’re off on your own running your own box. So a lot of people have moved to using hosted web services. Those web services tend to converge and so you end up with companies like Rackspace which now control large percentages of the independent web.

“Where this has really gotten crazy is in social media. Social media is almost by definition heavily centralised.” Ethan says the reason for this is “it’s a namespace problem”, which is a short and rather technical way of saying that we need directories like Facebook and Twitter to make it easy for us to find our friends online among the sea of people who share their names. Just as the Screen Actors Guild and Equity stipulate that no two of their members may have the same stage name to avoid confusion, Facebook and Twitter make sure no two of their users have the same handle or identifying code, meaning you can always find the exact Ethan Zuckerman or Becky Hogge you’re looking for.

What all this means is that although the rhetoric behind the ‘net was one of radical decentralisation, disintermediation and the chance at a truly plural public sphere, the reality of it pens us into what are essentially a handful of corporate pseudo-public spaces.

“It’s terrifying,” says Ethan. “And the reason it’s terrifying is that much of the thinking that we’ve done about the internet is thinking about open standards, autonomous agents, all able to make our own decisions. But if you are using a social media platform or a blogging platform to publish your thoughts, you are within one of these large spaces. At a certain point, you are dependent on their rules of the road for your continued existence.”

Ethan found himself thinking about this problem for the first time when friends of his in Zimbabwe, a human rights organisation called Kubatana, were told by their hosting provider Bluehost, one of the largest in the US, that they had to go. When Kubatana asked Bluehost why, the response was simple but shocking: ”because you’re Zimbabwean.”

What had happened was this. The US Department of Trade maintains a list of sanctioned individuals in Zimbabwe with whom US companies are prevented from doing business, and the penalties for violating those sanctions had been slowly ratcheting up over the last few years. At some point Bluehost’s lawyers had apparently decided that, legal niceties aside, it probably wasn’t worth their while serving any Zimbabweans. The edict had gone out “Get rid of the Zimbabweans. They’re not worth it.”

“So what happened,” Ethan recounts, “was well after Kubatana had signed up to their account, Bluehost changed their terms of service.” Most ‘net companies reserve the right to change their terms of service at any time, often without notifying the users who unwittingly agree to abide by them. “Their new terms of service state, ‘I am not a Zimbabwean’ or Syrian or Cuban or any number of other countries. And so my friends were being kicked out for being Zimbabwean. Now, if you’re a human rights activist in Zimbabwe, this is a pretty easy fight as far as they go. So they decided to start a fight. They got the US Embassy in Harare to call the Treasury Department and have the Treasury Department call this company and say, ‘You idiots, fix this’. And so three weeks later after much nasty email exchanges there was an apology from the CEO inviting them back.” At which point, according to Ethan, they said what they had intended to say all along, namely, “Go fuck yourself.” They now host with Verio.

The Open Net Initiative published a report in 2010 detailing the practices of five major social networking and blogging platforms - Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Blogger – and the effects these practices were having on free speech. Based on these investigations, the report speculated that Facebook was using a crude, numbers-based system for policing its content, automatically deactivating accounts and group pages if a threshold of complaints was met. It also identified specific Facebook groups who were gaming this system, for example a group of Arab Muslims whose stated aim was to get the account of every atheist Arab deleted by Facebook’s automated system. Although YouTube was found to offer better avenues of redress to users who felt their content had been removed unfairly, ONI discovered anecdotal evidence to show that it too set the threshold of permitted speech far higher than one might expect of, say, serious broadcasting.
YouTube had deleted a number of human rights videos – mostly from the Arab world – on the basis of the violence and illegal activity they depicted, rather than the context in which those depictions were being communicated. Flickr too, had come up against human rights activists - this time in Romania – angry at content removed from their streams.

The ONI are not anti-capitalists. They make clear in the introduction to their report that they understand that corporations who provide services like YouTube and Facebook are working under competing pressures: the pressure to create a viable business, to keep their services available in countries with restrictive laws, and the pressure to avoid politically-motivated cyber-attacks on their infrastructure from groups keen to suppress ideas through force. ”Negotiating this terrain often means compromising,” they write, ”sometimes at the expense of users”.
Nonetheless, the ONI also rightly identify the current state of affairs as deeply precarious. Because the platforms they investigated are beginning to dominate online communications, the efforts these platform operators make to police their own content will have a substantial and growing impact on free expression and public discourse:

As users flock toward popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, they are effectively stepping away from public streets and parks and into the spaces similar in some ways to
shopping malls – spaces that are privately owned and often subject to stringent rules and lacking in freedoms.

As Ethan puts it, “it’s sort of like saying, ‘let’s go have a good public argument about this. And we’ll do it at Terminal 5 at Heathrow’. If what’s interesting about internet freedom is this idea of creating digital public spaces where we can debate whatever issues are relevant. And if what’s exciting about internet freedom is that countries that don’t have conventional public spaces could now have digital public spaces, then we have to recognise, those aren’t public spaces. Those are private spaces; those are corporate-controlled spaces.”

In No Logo, Naomi Klein details exactly what’s wrong with the real-world emergence of the pseudo-public space in corporate America:

“The conflation of shopping and entertainment found at the superstores and theme-park malls has created a vast grey area of pseudo-public private space. Politicians, police, social workers and even religious leaders all recognize that malls have become the modern town square. But unlike the old town squares, which were and still are sites for community discussion, protests and political rallies, the only type of speech that is welcome here is marketing and other consumer patter. Peaceful protestors are routinely thrown out by mall security guards for interfering with shopping, and even picket lines are illegal inside these enclosures.”

It’s ironic that a technology that gave citizens the ability to take back public space and public discourse from corporate control could have turned so quickly into the anti-globalisation movement’s worst nightmare – a virtual corporate beast a hundred times more efficient than anything in the real world at exploiting the citizen-consumer’s own expression and desire in order to sell advertising. Why did things pan out so differently from the way early geeks expected them to?

“This was such an anti-corporate space when a lot of people were starting to play with it for the first time,” says Ethan. “If your first internet experience was the WELL, you might have asked, ‘Who the hell’s going to make money off a bunch of Grateful Dead fans?’ My first experience was Usenet. And the notion that someone was somehow going to make money off that cesspool seemed utterly ludicrous. Back then, I’d always assumed that when we were promising investors that we’d do good things with their money that, you know, we were probably going to lose money hand over fist. So it’s never made any sense to me.”

Ethan is thinking back to his Tripod.com days, before the big sale to Lycos. “In the nineties, we were these scrappy little youngsters in a house in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with no affiliations to big companies. And the companies that were big, and that we admired, had silly names like Yahoo! and their founders rode around on skateboards. So it was hard to think of this as the big corporate consolidation. It looked like the internet was this space where anyone could do anything with very few resources and a very low start-up cost. And in fact that does seem to continue to sort of be true. You know, Twitter was able to become Twitter pretty damn fast. So I think maybe it is still a pretty open space. In that, if you can create a platform and convince
people that they want to be on it you are free to do that. But I think it is a space that naturally consolidates. And I think it consolidates because of brand.”

So much for No Logo. Ethan explains, “When geography no longer matters, brand matters a lot more. I remember people saying in 1998, ’I want to be the number one retailer in the online pet and pet food space.’ It turns out that there is no online pet and pet foods space. There’s an online retail space, Amazon is number one at it. Being number two at it isn’t very helpful. But I think that was hard to call. And I think it was hard to call, because the myth of the garage entrepreneur doesn’t seem like it is about centralisation.”

Though we started with water, Ethan and I have moved on to beer, and I’m feeling a little bold. What, I ask him, does this tell us about us? After all, evil forces are not at play here. The internet actually resisted regulatory interference from the old order in quite an amazing way, at least in its early years. Were we always unlikely to match up to the net’s potential?
Ethan takes a sip of his drink and thinks. “We’re sitting near the heart of a city of, how many million people?”

I tell him ten, although I’m none too sure.

“That’s a lot of people…” he says.

“That is a lot of people,” I reply.

“And they’ve decided to get together in a fairly close environment. The real estate here, the permission to use this piece of land we’re sitting on, it’s a whole lot more expensive than in some other parts of this country. Human beings like being together. And we have this natural tendency to get together. In fact we’re watching this happen across the world right now. We’re urbanising and we’re urbanising very quickly because when people get together there’s more opportunity, there’s more excitement. You know there’s just more, the closer you get together. I think centralisation is in the human spirit. And I think what’s interesting is this. You know the reason why London doesn’t have one giant Sainsbury’s? It’s geography. We couldn’t all get to it. And if we could, we couldn’t all get through it, right? You know, we’d all end up fighting over the iceberg lettuce and you’d never get to the rocket. And there’d be a big, big problem. The internet lets us all go to  Sainsbury’s at the same time, and we can all get our lettuce at the same time. And at a certain point the question then becomes, well why not just have one Sainsbury’s?”

Like Frontline’s founder, Vaughan Smith, neither Ethan nor I live in a city. He lives in rural Massachusetts with his wife and son, a three-hour drive out of Boston. I live in an area of Cambridgeshire that produces a significant proportion of the vegetables Sainsbury’s stocks on its shelves. But we’re the exception, not the rule. In global terms, we’re ludicrously wealthy – in the top 1%. We’re running off to rural areas because we believe that when we get there, we’ll be free. Perhaps for the same reason, we both fell prey to the excitement of decentralisation promised by the ‘net.

“We’re Utopians,” Ethan says.

Buy the Kindle edition on Amazon.co.uk.

Buy the print edition on Amazon.co.uk.

More ways to buy, beg, borrow and share the book.

The post Barefoot into Cyberspace appeared first on Index on Censorship.