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.

Date: 27 February 
Time: 6:30pm
Venue: Free Word Centre, London

Index on Censorship and the Institute for Human Rights and Business invite you to attend the launch of Rebecca MacKinnon’s new book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom.

Rebecca MacKinnonis the co-founder of Global Voices Online. In her new book she argues that a global struggle for control of the Internet is now underway. At stake are no less than civil liberties, privacy and even the character of democracy in the 21st century. Join us for a discussion with the author, along with writer and journalist Salil Tripathi.  Chaired by Jo Glanville, Editor of Index on Censorship, followed by a drinks reception.

Register to attend: neill.wilkins@ihrb.org

The post PAST EVENT: Book launch: Rebecca MacKinnon’s Consent of the Networked appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Rebecca MacKinnon,  co-founder Global Voices Online; Bernard Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation; expert on Chinese internet censorship

I applaud the Secretary’s strong commitment to the idea that internet and telecommunications companies must uphold core and universal rights of free expression and privacy. It was also very important that Clinton reiterated US support for multi-stakeholder internet governance.

I also agree that “there is no silver bullet” or “app” for internet freedom. There is no one set of tools that will magically and easily free people living in authoritarian societies from oppression. She was right to emphasise that people cause revolutions, not technology — though smart use of technology certainly helps.

It is indeed a good thing that the US State Department continues to champion the free and open, globally interconnected internet as a core component of US foreign policy.

I am also not surprised, however, that US government’s global internet freedom policy is dogged and weakened by the same types of contradictions that have dogged and weakened US credibility on human rights and democracy promotion for the past half-century.

While the State Department advocates internet freedom other parts of the US government are pursuing aims that run directly counter to the idea of a free and open internet where dissent and unpopular speech can be protected.

I found the section of her speech dedicated to Wikileaks to be weak and logically inconsistent. She conflated the actions of the alleged leaker who stole classified documents (Bradley Manning) with the actions of the publisher (Wikileaks the organisation).

In an ideal world I wish that the US Secretary of State would declare to the world that while she and her colleagues believe that Wikileaks was irresponsible, the United States has a First Amendment protecting free speech. It is a country based on rule of law and due process which must be respected without fail in order for our democracy to remain strong.

I wish that she could have stated that even the most difficult and troubling cases must be handled with full respect for the fundamental principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Unfortunately, the statement she did make will give comfort to governments everywhere that want to treat whistleblowers, and organisations that publish information obtained from whistleblowers, as criminals from the get-go before a case is even made or a judgment is delivered.

Read Rebecca MacKinnon’s full analysis here

Ian Brown, senior research fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Hillary Clinton is right to say “the choices we make today will determine what the internet looks like in the future”. The US government can have a long-term impact by supporting the development and use of technology in tune with her vision of the “freedom to connect”.

Such technology would make it easy for individuals to debate, organise and protest online without making it trivial for government spies and monitor and suppress those activities. It would widely distribute control, rather than concentrate it in government or corporate hands that can easily choose to extinguish speech — as Amazon did in throwing Wikileaks off their servers.

It would certainly not come with surveillance functionality built in – as the US, UK and many other western governments require of internet routers and telephone exchanges and would like to extend to social media sites.

In short: Clinton needs to make sure the internet’s future public spaces look more like Tahrir Square and less like Tiananmen Square.

Wen Yunchao is a prominent Guangdong-based internet activist. Writing for platforms including the now banned bullog.cn, Wen established himself as one of China’s best-known bloggers –– under the alias Bei Feng –– and new media experts.

From a macroscopic point of view, as I see it, Hillary Clinton’s speech today shows Obama ideas of freedom of speech taking the fruit of Bush’s labour over democracy in the Middle East.

In terms of the protests in Egypt, apart from [helping] convene people on the first day, the internet did not have an effect in the following few days. Compared to Hillary Clinton’s last speech on internet freedom, there isn’t much new.

Her comments on the “approach… that matches our diplomacy with technology, secure distribution networks for tools, and direct support for those on the front lines” is a more direct expression compared to the last speech. My attitude to this: “Listen to their speech. Also watch their actions”.

From my sources, I know that in terms of current methods for breaking down internet control, the American government, Congress and the people who provide funding do not want to aim their target at the surveillance in China.

The level of control in China is very high and very meticulous. Also, resisting them could affect the arrangement of other interests. However, these technologies may have a better effect on Iran, and countries like Iran.

Leslie Harris, President/ CEO, Center for Democracy & Technology

The Secretary of State presented a cogent, clear affirmation of the importance of maintaining a free and open internet.

In the wake of recent events — the employment of an internet “kill switch” by Egyptian authorities and the harnessing of social media by democracy advocates in the Middle East, she showed a nuanced understanding of the internet and strongly embraced a medium that can be unpredictable and at times at odds with government aims.

Even as the Wikileaks controversy continues to unfold, Clinton made clear that the State Department stands with the internet.

It was a powerful example that should be heeded by world leaders as well as our policymakers here at home.

Mahmoud Salem, Egyptian activist and  Sandmonkey blogger

As someone who was actively involved in the creation of the Egyptian blogsphere, and been a cyber-activist for years, I must say that I am against any kind of type of restrictions placed on the net in the name of security or responsible speech. The internet has been a wonderful resource because it is  both open to everybody and self-correcting at the same time.

The anonymity provided by it is what protects those of us in opressive countries from oppressive governments. No matter how much risk might exist from the information on it, we can’t start applying the current conditions of free speech of any country to it, since it belongs to all countries, independent of culture or government.

Not to mention that the majority of security and identity protection measures and technology was presented by the net itself, and not by any government. Netizens have proven to be responsible citizens — with some exceptions — and we can’t punish the majority because a minority bothers us. I urge Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration to leave the internet alone.

Emily Bell, Professor of Professional Practice; Director, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia Journalism School
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on internet freedom was always going to draw a skeptical reception.
There are many contradictions in how the US government has tackled the issue of the internet; from a rather ambivalent approach to net neutrality, through the involvement in industry of providing cyber security to overseas repressive regimes, to its extremely hostile reaction to the Wikileaks disclosure of diplomatic cables.

At the heart of the speech, which sought to underline a commitment of the US government to “internet openness” guaranteed by the development of common global standards, there was a great deal about “balance”.

Clinton talked about how the Wikileaks episode underlined the need for security to be balanced against openness, and several times used the words “theft” and “Wikileaks” in conjunction without acknowledging that Wikileaks had not actually stolen the cables but was a conduit for publication — just like the press Clinton is anxious to keep free.

That said, by  raising the issue of internet openness Clinton is challenging the US administration and businesses as much as she is  overseas regimes, like Thailand and China, who she called out for censorship.

The rhetoric as Clinton noted has to be met with activism. Does this mean that the encroachment of the principles of net neutrality will be met by firmer resistance?  Or that the US Government will define a public position on the trade between the cyber security industry and repressive regimes?  Or even what the cyber surveillance is of its own citizens?

The irony of the timing of the speech was not lost on the Twitterverse. As Clinton spoke, lawyers from the department of justice were defending their pursuit of information on Wikileaks operatives, which involved ordering platforms such as Twitter to hand over user data on individuals it linked to the organisation.

All the major search companies and email providers found in the wake of tightened national security in 2001 that their own legal teams spent significant time fielding requests from government to disclose data under the flag of national security.

Clinton has described this aim of an open internet as a project which will evolve and be judged over years, and says it is “the grand challenge” of our time.

The Secretary of State’s remarks could be an important point in the development of the open net if it is backed by action.  For that to really take, there needs to be more explicit acknowledgement of what the issues are domestically as well as abroad.

Maybe that is what is coming next. If not, then the words will remain only that.

Katitza Rodriguez, International Rights director, Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF)

Secretary Clinton’s speech did not go far enough as regards corporate social responsibility. The Electric Frontier Foundation felt that the speech could have done more to address the role that corporations should play in the protection of citizens’ privacy, freedom of expression and fundamental human rights.

As she recognised, most of people’s communication and interactions online rely on websites and networks that are privately owned and operated. We would have liked to have seen more comments on the role and opportunities for corporations to provide meaningful protection for individual’s rights online.

Corporate social responsibility is a crucial part of developing international human rights norms, especially at a time when government action on the internet is increasingly more indirect and may fall outside of limitations on government power.

EFF believes that the selling of customised surveillance technologies to authoritarian regimes in situations where companies know, or should know, that governments may use those technologies to target people for arrest, torture, and enforced disappearance is in violation of international human rights standards, and deserves close scrutiny.

One area that deserves further investigation is whether corporations that sell technologies that could be used to violate human rights should undertake thorough and independent human rights impact assessments before engaging with authoritarian regimes.
Read more from EFF here

The post Analysis: Index’s experts assess Hillary Clinton’s latest speech on internet freedom appeared first on Index on Censorship.

“In the long run, it’s a good thing,” says Rebecca MacKinnon, expert on internet censorship in China and fellow at the New America Foundation. “It shows that people who stand up for their beliefs will not simply disappear into prison to be forgotten by the world. The tens of thousands who signed Charter 08, some of whom were questioned by police or disciplined by employers for having done so, will be encouraged that they’re on the right side of history and that their risk wasn’t a wasted effort.”

Now 54, Liu was a young university professor at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. He left his post at Columbia University to join the pro-democracy movement in Beijing, and held a hunger strike in support of the students.  As an advocate for non-violent activism, he disarmed a group of workers who had arrived with guns to defend the protesters, and helped to evacuate the square on the last day of the demonstrations, preventing further bloodshed. Liu was arrested for his involvement in the protests, and spent two years in prison.

After criticising China’s one-party system and calling for dialogue between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama of Tibet, Liu was sentenced to three years of “re-education through labour” in 1996. He had only recently married Liu Xia, who was not allowed to visit him for 18 months because they had not managed to obtain a marriage certificate before his imprisonment. Eventually, their lawyer won them dispensation to marry in the labour camp.

In 2004, Liu Xiaobo wrote an essay attacking the use of “subversion” charges to censor, and ultimately silence, journalists and activists. Following the essay’s publication, Liu’s telephone lines and internet connections were blocked.

After nearly 20 years of activism came Liu’s most famous contribution to the campaign against human rights abuses — and the one for which he has been punished most severely — Charter 08. The manifesto, published on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, called for reform and democracy in China, and was signed by 303 Chinese intellectuals.

On 9 December, the night before the document’s release, police arrested Liu at his home in Beijing. They confiscated his computer and other materials from the campaign. He was held in detention with no outside communication until 31 December, when his wife was finally allowed to visit him.

After Liu’s arrest, almost all of the original signatories were interrogated in an attempt to gather evidence against him, but his trial lasted only a day.

While the award will highlight the increasingly harsh treatment of dissidents in China and support the struggle for freedom of speech, there are fears that international support for human rights activists may lead to a backlash.

Isabel Hilton, leading expert on China and trustee of Free Word, told Index: “Judging by the government’s response, it is not going to make Liu Xiaobo’s life any easier, but when the history of free expression and freedom of ideas is written, he and the other signatories of Charter 08 will be remembered as courageous citizens who sought the best for their country.”

Join PEN America’s campaign for Liu Xiaobo’s release here.

The post A life in truth appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Ever since Google
entered China in 2006 and launched a censored Chinese search engine, Google.cn, the company has come under fire from human rights groups and free speech activists for helping to legitimise the Chinese government’s censorship policies. Staffers say that Google’s decision to comply with Chinese censorship in order to enter China’s fast-growing and potentially lucrative market was made only after heated internal debates over the ethical pros and cons.

In January 2006, at the time of Google.cn’s launch, senior policy counsel Andrew McLaughlin explained that his company was trying to remain true to the company mantra, ‘don’t be evil’. He acknowledged that censoring Google.cn’s search results ‘clearly compromises our mission’, but he argued that ‘failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population, however, does so far more severely’. McLaughlin also made clear that while Google was going into China with censored search, it would be keeping other services like Gmail and blogspot out of China in order to avoid making further compromises on user privacy and freedom of expression.

On 15 December 2009, I interviewed David Drummond, Google’s senior vice president, corporate development and chief legal officer, at the company’s idyllic campus-like headquarters known as the ‘Googleplex’ in Mountain View, California. By bizarre coincidence, at the same time a massive, highly sophisticated attack was launched from China against Google’s systems. The attackers honed in on Gmail and, even more specifically, the accounts of human rights activists who work on China issues. The attack lasted into early January. On 12 January, David Drummond announced on the official Google Policy Blog that his company was rethinking its business in China:

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered – combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web – have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google. cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognise that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Soon after the announcement, I emailed David Drummond some follow-up questions. As this issue went to press [in March], the fallout over Google’s public stand against Chinese censorship and attacks aimed at obtaining the private communications of Google’s users continues. Below is an edited transcript: the more recent emailed questions appear on pages 35–36 followed by the December interview.

Our conversation dealt not only with China. At the time of the interview, Drummond and three other Google executives were facing criminal charges in Italy over a video of an autistic child being bullied by classmates: in late February, an Italian judge found Drummond and two of the other executives guilty of privacy invasion. Google intends to appeal the six-month suspended sentences, calling the ruling an attack on ‘the very principles of freedom on which the internet is built’. RM

Rebecca MacKinnon: When we spoke on 15 December, you defended Google’s decision to be in China. Was Google management already starting to reconsider things at that time? Or did it all happen after the most recent round of hacker attacks – which I understand started right around the time we did the interview?

David Drummond: We discovered in December that Google had been the target of an unusually sophisticated cyber attack. When we launched Google. cn in 2006, we believed that the benefits of increased access to information in China for Chinese citizens and a more open internet outweighed the discomfort of agreeing to censor some results. While many of these arguments still hold true, we believe the events of the last year mean we can no longer, in all good conscience, continue to co-operate with the Chinese authorities in filtering results on Google.cn. As we said when we launched Google.cn in January 2006, ‘We will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.’

Rebecca MacKinnon: To what degree was the decision to re-evaluate Google’s presence in China about the hacker attack [in January], to what degree was it about the worsening censorship environment, and to what degree was it about other – more pragmatic – short and long-term commercial considerations, both in China as well as globally? If you had to apply a percentage weighting to each factor what would it be?

David Drummond: What’s clear is that the environment in which we were operating in terms of an open internet was not improving in China. There have been a number of episodes over the past year that have widely been reported on, including the events surrounding Green Dam content-control software, as well as people in China reporting difficulties in accessing services from Google and other internet companies, as well as the blockage of YouTube. That, combined with these attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered, meant we decided to take a new approach in China. In terms of commercial considerations – we just had our most successful quarter ever in China, but our revenues there are not material to our business, and a large percentage of them are for the export market – that is, Chinese companies advertising to users abroad on our different search engines. This decision was about freedom of expression and an open internet.

Rebecca MacKinnon: A lot of internet users in China were very upset upon first hearing Google might leave. They are worried the Chinese internet will become more closed and balkanised than ever before. What’s your message to them?

David Drummond: We hope to find a solution with the Chinese government. Our Chinese users, partners and employees are very important to us, and we hope we can find a positive outcome. We hope to be able to operate securely in China and in a way that increases access to information for our users in China. We will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. But we recognise that this may mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. We are committed to protecting the safety and security of our users and products and believe reviewing the feasibility of our business operations in China is the most constructive way to do that.

Rebecca MacKinnon: Do you plan to do more than you’ve done in the past to help Chinese internet users who want to access all the information available on the global internet – not just the sub-set of information their government wants them to see?

David Drummond: We will be meeting with the Chinese government and hope to find a mutually agreeable resolution, so it’s too early to speculate. We are continuing to operate Google.cn in compliance with Chinese law, and users are also able to access our Chinese-language service on Google.com.

Rebecca MacKinnon: Are you disappointed that other companies seem disinclined to follow Google’s lead?

David Drummond: We’re not going to comment on specific companies. As we have made clear, at least 20 other large companies from a wide range of businesses – including the internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors – have been similarly targeted. Undemocratic trends (December interview)

Rebecca MacKinnon: Google went through a lot of soul searching in making the decision to go into China – to do it with google.cn, but not to move forward with other services like Gmail or blogger. But even so, might one argue that this one compromise started Google down a slippery slope that has made government censorship demands of international internet companies more legitimate? Or has helped to legitimise the compliance with government censorship requests in a global way? And has it also made it more possible for other governments – from Thailand to Turkey to Italy – to expect that Google will comply with demands to take down content, remove results, filter certain content?

David Drummond: No. I don’t think that’s true. No, not at all. We’ve been quite clear that what we did with China was something we did specifically in China because of the specific dynamics that are in that market and in that country, which is a unique country on the face of the earth. There is no question about that. I don’t believe that anything we did in China had any effect on the Thai government’s requests of us, the Turkish government’s requests of us, the Italian government’s requests of us, on any state government’s or state police’s requests on us at all. Nor did what we did in China have any effect on our responses – we have stood firm against lots of requests. We’ve honoured them where we felt they were legitimate, but not where they weren’t. That has not changed, and I don’t think China, and our decision to enter China in the way that we did, had any effect on that. As for other internet companies, I don’t think that what we did should have any impact on them either – it’s up to them how they operate.

Rebecca MacKinnon: When we think about chilling effects on free expression we tend to pick China, we tend to think of Iran, but are you concerned that there are trends in democratic nations that are going to make it harder for Google to be a platform of free expression?

David Drummond: Over the past couple of years, the focus of issues around censorship and free expression has almost moved from non-democratic states like China or Vietnam to emerging democracies or emerging economies. Places like Thailand or Turkey. Now, more and more, we are seeing rumblings in what seem to be democratic countries. Let me give you an example: South Korea, where they passed a law saying you had to identify yourself if you post anything – with your real identity, through the use of a national ID number. It’s hugely chilling to free speech. In France, apparently, there are legislators talking about the same thing now. In Australia, the government has passed this law that allows a blacklist of terms and sites that the government will be empowered to censor. All in the name of filtering and child protection. But when you heard the conservative government down there talking about it, it was clear they had designs perhaps on things that were offensive to Christianity and on harmful content beyond child protection. And that is where it seems to start in the West – protecting children. Everybody agrees child pornography is illegal and all of us should do something about it, but protecting children and then moving forward from there does seem like the slippery slope unless we start turning things around.

Rebecca MacKinnon: So speaking of trying to get it turned around and what Google may be doing on that – I understand that [last December] Google hosted a meeting which was written about on the Google policy blog. Some people from the Citizen Lab in Toronto and the Open Net Initiative came, and basically gave a presentation on the fact that filtering, the blocking of websites at a national level, is growing all over the world, just as you describe. And on this blog, a colleague of yours wrote that given the urgency of this issue [Google is] hoping to bring online free expression to the forefront of policy discussions. So I’m wondering if you could elaborate a bit on how Google plans to do this.

David Drummond: We think that too often the problems of censorship on the internet have been made out to be issues solely between a repressive government and some internet actor or some internet company – and those were the only players you had to be concerned about. The fact of the matter is that it’s a government to government issue. We have been trying to engage governments in the West who care about this issue and get them to start raising this question and use their powers of persuasion on other governments, who perhaps don’t have the free speech traditions, and put pressure on them to maintain an open and free internet. Censorship is bad for business I think that holding governments’ feet to the fire on the principle [of human rights] is something we’d like to do. Now, we also realise that getting governments to implement human rights treaties has not exactly been … there are not a lot of great examples of universal success there. So the other angle we are taking is encouraging western governments – and we have talked to the US government quite a bit about this – to make free expression a trade issue. Because indeed it is, right? If you are talking about the internet – in addition to being a global means of expression it is a global means of trade. For a country like, say, China to use filtering and censorship in order to make it difficult for companies from other places to operate – it seems like that ought to be addressed. When you are talking about multilateral or bilateral trade discussions, just as piracy has been put on the agenda, free expression should be put on the agenda. It ought to be something that is part of the conversation, and western governments whose economies certainly benefit from the hi-tech sector, the internet sector, [should] make this happen.

Rebecca MacKinnon: How much success are you having so far? Particularly with the US government?

David Drummond: The US government has been receptive, there have been a number of conversations with the State Department and the trade representative’s office and I think they’re very interested in this idea. Same with the UK government. A question of transparency

Rebecca MacKinnon: I’m on a list with a whole other bunch of observers – activists – who are working against censorship in various countries. One person on the list actually just complained that they feel that Google is not transparent enough with users about what it is doing in Thailand – the filtering of specific content and so on. It may be clear to Google and to the Thai government – or to insiders – what is going on, but it is completely unclear to users on the ground why certain things are blocked and why certain other things are not blocked. Could Google perhaps be doing a better job at helping users understand what’s going on here?

David Drummond: Probably. Yes, we probably could. And that is something I certainly think we should strive to do better on. I think one of the best ways to fight censorship is to shed light when it happens. I think it is pretty important for us to make clear to our users and to the world when it is that we feel required to remove something.

Rebecca MacKinnon: When you are delisting search results, you have this thing that says some results have been removed, but it doesn’t end up solving the problem. You are helping to create an environment where people’s information environment is manipulated and they don’t know what they don’t know – because it has been delisted they have no way of figuring out what information it is that they are being denied. Of course, that is the point of censorship, and which you continue to enable – even though you’ve got the warning sign, even though people are seeing that they are not getting the results. So, how do you respond to that? How might Google help make it more clear to users, how they can go about discovering what it is they are being deprived of?

David Drummond: Google.com is always going to be unfiltered, and so it is up to governments to block that if they want to – some of them do. If we are in a position where we feel we have to comply with the law – I mean it is very easy for an activist just to say, ‘You shouldn’t be there’, but the fact of the matter is it’s important for us to be in some of these countries. We are in a position where we are trying to deliver internet services and tools to people which change their lives and make their lives better, and there are times when we can’t do that. We can do that and risk our employees going to jail and risk further blockages and so forth. But you’ve got to decide where it’s just an obvious end run on the law, and then it’s tough for us. Which is why, again, we think a lot more activism should be directed towards getting these governments to change some laws. Especially when you are talking about governments that western governments trade with, have diplomatic relations with. We are not just talking about rogue governments here. And so that was my point earlier, that we should be ratcheting up the pressure on these governments that want to do business with the West, that want help from the West, that want to deal with the West. Focusing on internet companies only, which has tended to be what happens in this debate, or this discussion, I think doesn’t help. There is only so much an internet company can do. The choices are: you stay there, push back, insist that if someone’s going to try and get information from you, or get you to censor something, that they are following a law. And you make sure that you think that the law was legitimate, in the sense that there is some form of democratic process that created it. You go through all of that, with a very, very narrow view for what you are going to do here. You make these calls that sometimes someone’s not going to agree with, but the alternative is: you’re not there at all.

Rebecca MacKinnon: And then people have even less access. I’m going to push a little bit more on that, however, understanding that this is tough, these are tough decisions, and that they are made by people who are trying to do the right thing. Nonetheless, by complying with censorship demands at all, and in the short term enabling people to access your services, which very arguably does those people a lot of good, however, does that also lessen the pressure and lessen the urgency for people to engage in the kind of activism that you are advocating: activism directed against the government to change their policies? Does it make people less urgent about it because they are getting enough of Google? Whereas if you guys just didn’t compromise at all, and got blocked pretty much everywhere, would there be so much anger from so many people that that would actually – in the more medium term – lead to more pressure for governments to change their policies and not to filter?

David Drummond: No, that just doesn’t work, because the predominant mode that we operate in is we push back and we don’t censor, right? And that has led to lots of blockages. And in some cases blocks have caused internet users to hue and cry and in some countries caused governments to lift blocks – certainly that has happened. But look, China is what we are really talking about here. And I think it is a nice theoretical point to make. But if [we’re talking about] the realities of providing internet services on the ground to people and what they actually get out of them, I think that practically speaking it is a better course to try to navigate it as best you can. Keeping it private

Rebecca MacKinnon: [Google chief executive] Eric Schmidt of course created a lot of uproar [at the end of last year] with his comments that ‘If you have something you don’t want anyone to know then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place’, and people felt that this is a bit dismissive about privacy. What would you have to say to them to reassure them that Google takes their privacy seriously?

David Drummond: Well, we’ll say what we always say – which is that we lead the industry in the things that we do to protect people’s privacy. I defy you to point to an instance in which we have damaged someone’s privacy or we’ve caused harm because of the way we operate with information. If you look at the way we built our products and the things we say about that shows that there is a strong commitment there. We have to. If we didn’t we really wouldn’t have much of a business. If users truly believed that we weren’t protecting their privacy they wouldn’t use the services, because they don’t have to. The power of Google

Rebecca MacKinnon: Despite what you say about Google having all the best intentions on privacy and really working on it, Google has a reputation problem in that there is a public perception that Google has too much power, has too much of our information.

David Drummond: Some people have that perception, but I’d say that millions and millions of our users don’t.

Rebecca MacKinnon: Different people have different perceptions. But we all depend on Google’s products for a lot of things. This is in part because the products are very good – I’m a Gmail user and so on. But at the same time you do have this huge responsibility and – of course – Google has the mantra ‘don’t be evil’, and you are a member of Global Network Initiative [forum of NGOs and industry advancing freedom of expression in technology]. You are doing various things to try and prove to users that ‘Look, we really do have your best interests in mind.’ Yet there are still a lot of people who don’t buy that necessarily. Even though they might still be using Google products, just because they are so ubiquitous. Google is in uncharted territory, in so many different ways, in our society today, and Google is part of this layer that is being built – information, web, telecommunication services, especially now you guys are getting into DNS and phones. You are building this layer upon which we depend for our personal lives and our business, our politics, everything. While your intentions may be honourable, it turns into a whole issue of governance, really, in that this is not just a product or just even a service – it is a place. And so, do you need to start treating your users almost more like citizens of the place rather than as users or customers? In order to gain people’s trust, in terms of how you make decisions, in terms of how you’re approaching and shaping this layer upon which we are increasingly dependent, does there need to be a new kind of thinking?

David Drummond: We do actually do that because people vote with their feet when they use our services. They don’t have to. I would quarrel with the premise that somehow Google services are the only services out there that people are using.

Rebecca MacKinnon: I’m not saying they are the only ones.

David Drummond: People use them because they work pretty well, and they don’t think we are doing nefarious things with such information as they give us. I think we do have a responsibility – we carry it out. The question you have to ask yourself is: should a company like Google not innovate because of some of these concerns that have never come into play, that have never happened? And should you stop innovating, and stop doing things that users are going to really like? So in other words, if you look at things like intraspace advertising, or something like that, you say: well, you can create really useful apps, that are a lot better than apps that people see now, right? And advertisers find it really useful, and users too, because advertising is a form of information on what someone might want in a search query. An ad might even be better information than some editorial or organic kind of information. So, should you not do it? Or should you do it in a way that tries to build in some protection, tries to build in transparency and tells people what is going on. That is what we try to do. Too many of the criticisms seem to not try to strike the balance. We are all for putting our heads together with other people and rolling up our sleeves and figuring out how we create some pretty good balances, so we don’t stop innovation and create things that work really well for people, but still protect privacy. So people sense that bad things are not going to happen. We recognise that because we have got bigger and we have influence, and lots of people use our services and like using our services, that there are concerns about what we might do if we wanted to do bad things.

Rebecca MacKinnon: I get everything you are saying. Yet it seems that Google’s default is still a bit in the direction of: ‘Trust us, we’re good people, we’re working in your interests.’

David Drummond: That is correct.

Rebecca MacKinnon: And the question is: does that work sufficiently? What are the safeguards in place to make sure that Google’s power is not abused? And, of course, in American democracy we’ve put safeguards in place. We kind of assume that human nature is corruptible. Is Google doing enough to assume that human nature is corruptible?

David Drummond: I think we do a lot, we build things into our products that we are not required to. I think we often go above and beyond – and spend a lot of time on the privacy implications of our products and how users are affected by our products and so forth. We’re not against rules. Regulation of services likes ours exists – and exists for very good reasons. We are not opposed to privacy laws: they are very important. We follow them and we do things where we don’t even have to. Intraspace advertising: there is no law that dictates we did what we did, but we did it anyway. We often go above and beyond. In some cases legislators are grappling with how [the internet] works and whether things ought to be changed. We are a part of all of these conversations, and for a lot of these conversations it makes sense for us to be a part of them. But again, these are conversations that need to be had in terms of looking at the entire industry and looking at how it ought to develop from a current public policy standpoint, as opposed to one company that should be doing X, Y and Z. It should be what everybody should be doing, right?

This article appears in the new issue of Index on Censorship, out Wednesday

Rebecca MacKinnon is a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. A former China-based journalist and academic, she is currently writing a book about the future of freedom in the internet age. She is co-founder of Global Voices Online, a non-profit citizen media network whose many corporate and philanthropic funders include Google. Along with Google, she is also a participant in the Global Network Initiative.

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