26 Jan 2011 | Uncategorized
Blogs, chatrooms and comment pages are the perfect locations in cyberspace for those who wish to demean, harrass, and humiliate individuals. Hate speech has always been a problem for defenders of extensive liberty of expression, but the Internet provides open platforms, the cloak of anonymity, and Google-enhanced discoverability: a heady mix for any would-be vilifier.
Where once the foul thoughts of non-entities would fester in the obscurity of private diaries and ephemeral hand-printed flyers, today they can climb the Google rankings aided by the hidden hand of its impersonal algorithms. What floats to the surface via a search isn’t necessarily pleasant, and individuals are often powerless to take action against the taint of personal abuse.
The philosopher Brian Leiter has coined the term “cyber-cesspools” to describe these repositories of abuse. He argues in his contribution to The Offensive Internet (eds. Saul Levmore and Martha D Nussbaum) that US Constitutional law recognises limits to “low-value” speech, and penalises defamation in other contexts, yet fear of over-zealous self-censorship by website owners has discouraged extension of legal prohibitions into the virtual world.
What is special about Internet cyber-speech, he points out, is that it tends to be permanent, divorced from context, and available to anyone. The harms this can cause are real. His solution is to require Google to set up a panel of neutral arbitrators to investigate the claims of private individuals that they are being harmed by the search returns, and then to delist, offer the abused a right to reply, or require the site’s proprietor to offer evidence that neither course of action is merited.
Leiter’s identification of the problem is important, and his analysis of causes sound, but any solution should provide a better situation than the status quo. In many real cases the difficulty of sifting through vile abuse and counter-abuse, would make mucking out the Augean stables an attractive alternative. Who in their right minds would ever take on such a role? And as Leiter himself discovered, attempts to control cyber-cess often generate new and larger pools of abuse. Internet pollution won’t be going away soon, I fear. Perhaps our best hope is to develop greater tolerance.
25 Jan 2011 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
A few memorable snapshots from today’s “Day of Rage” protests in Egypt:
• A group of about 100 protesters is marching along the Nile corniche chanting anti-government slogans. From the other direction comes a much larger group of demonstrators. The two sides embraced in the street amid raucous cheering and began marching together.
• About 1000 protesters march through the lower class district of Boulaq Aboul Ela. Many of the protesters appeal to sidewalk gawkers and local merchants to join them. I spot a matronly woman in her 40s holding a young girl and enthusiastically giving the marchers a thumbs up. Next to her, an elderly woman with about four teeth beams with pleasure and happily chants anti-government slogans as the demonstrators march past.
• With more than 1000 protesters jostling with riot police outside the Supreme Court downtown, I take a walk away from the war zone to look for side protests. On a deserted stretch of 26 July street, a young family — middle aged man and woman with a boy who looks about nine years old — walk arm-in-arm down the middle of the street chanting “down with Hosni Mubarak!”
Today was a day for witnessing scenes that most Egyptians never imagined would be possible. But with the echoes of the Tunisian uprising still rippling through the region, the Arab World’s most populous country is entering into uncharted waters. Inspired by the waves of civil unrest that drove Tunisian dictator Zine al Abideen Bin Ali from power earlier this month, Egyptians produced a public response unprecedented in at least 30 years.
Thousands of protesters took control of downtown Cairo’s central Tahrir square this afternoon as a series of nationwide demonstrations demanded an end to President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year reign. A massive deployment of black-clad riot police used water cannons, tear gas and batons to repel the protesters, who pushed through police cordons and established dominance over the entire square, just one block away from the Egyptian Parliament.
As of late afternoon, the situation downtown was tense and uncertain, with the police alternatively advancing behind a hail of tear gas canisters, then giving ground once the crowd regrouped. The air in Tahrir square was thick with the acrid stench of tear gas as police struggled to cope with the sheer size of the demonstration. Only time will tell if today’s events will produce something long-lasting that builds into an actual threat to President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year reign. But at the very least, this was the first time in 13 years of covering protests in Egypt that the protesters potentially outnumbered the police.
At one point, more than a thousand people stood outside a building on along the Nile belonging to Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party and chanted “illegitimate” and “Oh Mubarak, your plane is waiting for you” — a reference to Bin Ali’s abrupt flight into exile 10 days ago. Independent estimates on crowd size were sketchy, but the protest I witnessed in Tahrir Square numbered at least 5,000 strong, with reports of similarly sized crowds of demonstrators marching toward the city center to join the main protest.
Today’s events — timed to coincide with the National Police Day holiday — started as a series of scattered protests in at least six different parts of Cairo. Organizers had originally announced they would gather outside the Interior Ministry near Tahrir Square. But that proved to be a bluff, as word went out via Twitter and Facebook about a series of alternate gathering points. Throughout the day Twitter proved to be a crucial platform for both organisation and real-time reports from the street. But the service abruptly stopped working for most people around 4:30 pm, prompting speculation that it had been blocked.
By nightfall, calls were going out on Twitter for anyone living in the downtown area to bring supplies in preparation for an all-night sit-in. There was also a call for local residents to remove the password protection from their wireless networks so that protesters could use them to get online.
25 Jan 2011 | Uncategorized
Farewell Andy Gray, the former Scotland international with a penchant for dull jokes about women and the offside rule.
Gray has been sacked by Sky Sports after videos of him emerged on the Internet speaking off air: more than once, apparently, Gray had questioned assistant referee Sian Massey’s understanding of the offside rule.
After journalist James MacIntyre unearthed footage of Gray making a slightly off colour-joke today, the writing was on the wall for the former Everton star.
The reaction seems, so far, to be pretty unsympathetic. But one can’t help feeling queasy about the dismissal. Were Gray’s comments made on air? No. Has anyone at Sky Sports ever complained to human resources about Gray before? We haven’t been told. Will Richard Keys and others who took part in these conversations also be sacked? We’ll see.
But at the moment, Gray looks like a victim of Sky brand management. More worryingly, this adds to a culture where the internet has moved from a tool for popular free expression to a tool of citizen surveillance. Be careful what you say: it’ll probably end up on YouTube.
25 Jan 2011 | Uncategorized
A shorter version of this letter is published in this week’s New Statesman
I wish I could take Neil Clark on a trip around Belarus, to show him the country he failed to see. After that, I am sure, he could not bring himself to write that “Lukashenko wins elections not through fear, but because he has delivered social protection and rising standards of living.”
Either blinded by the longing to find the triumph of socialism in as many places as possible or simply having a very superficial knowledge of the country, Neil Clark, unfortunately, presents quite misleading view of Belarus as a stable, and even booming, economy in his article Immaterial pearl from the 10 January 2011 issue of New Statesman.
Many foreign journalists hop up on a plane for a few days’ trip to Minsk, and at the most make a quick tour around major regional centres, if they can be bothered to dig deeper into local opposition circles. Neil Clark, on the other hand, shies away from shocking scenes of police beating protesters, flashing in the headlines of other foreign media, and instead offers to weigh the government’s contribution to the life of common people.
Rather than interviewing political outcasts, the author chooses to attend a press conference at the “wonderfully retro ministry of economy” and a showcase of the country’s major plant, Belarusian Autoworks.
I am a native Belarusian, so it is hard for me to judge how much one could learn about my country during a short visit. But if I were to introduce Neil Clark to it, I would have taken him to Belarus via Poland on a midnight train through the border packed with Belarusian smugglers.
The smugglers are mostly women aged between 40 and 60 — unemployed or pensioners, many of them former schoolteachers, medical assistants, and bookkeepers, unable to sustain their families on state income. Some are working full time in their state jobs and make extra cash on weekends smuggling cigarettes and spirits into Poland and bringing back meat, clothes and household appliances — all of which, if they are available in Belarusian stores, are cheaper in Polish supermarkets.
And then, instead of checking into something like Minsk’s Inturist hotel, a network of hotels specifically designed in the former Soviet Union for international tourists, which I am sure brings a lot of sentimental feelings to those missing the high life of nomenklatura, I think Neil Clark should head to a kolkhoz, where “the old collectivist flame is kept alive”, to put it in his own words.
I would invite him to my native village Vasilishki, in the western part of Belarus — a typical settlement neither better nor worse than any other in the country, where a large part of the population is employed by a local collective farm. There is an alcoholic in every house there, and sometimes whole families are hooked on cheap wine-like drinks produced by state liquor plants, which in fact are more like coloured ethanol with psychotropic additives.
Alcohol is the only affordable form of entertainment for millions of Belarusians, because having a hundred dollar monthly salary can save you from starvation but does not offer much more than that. So they drink — to forget their miserable jobs and boring lives, to gain courage to face daily insults from local chiefs and abuses from police authorities, to kill the shame for not giving a better life to their children and not being able to provide care for their elderly parents. They drink to die — the sooner the happier.
On 20 December, a day after the presidential elections, I talked to my mom on the phone. And she cried. A shy provincial woman, who has never been actively engaged into politics, she cried because the opposition lost! She cried because she is tired of being scared to lose her modest income, tired of her helplessness at the hands of local bureaucrats, tired of lies fed to Belarusians from the state TV.
She is tired of unhappiness and this one time she hoped her life could change.
Your Immaterial pearl, Mr Clark, is a cruel mockery of millions of ordinary Belarusians, of whose well being you care, I hope, so much…
