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TechnoratiPropaganda.com
This year's report on 'enemies of the Internet' prepared by Reporters Without Borders, the international press advocacy group, paints a very gloomy picture for theeedom of expression on the Web. It finds that many governments have stepped up their attacks on the Internet, harassing bloggers and making it harder to express dissenting opinions online.
These are very disturbing trends. But identifying 'Internet enemies' only on the basis of censorship and intimidation, as Reporters Without Borders has done, obfuscates the fact that these are only two components of a more comprehensive and multi-pronged approach that authoritarian governments have developed to diffuse the subversive potential of online communications.
Many of these governments have honed their Internet strategies beyond censorship and are employing more subtle (and harder to detect) ways of controlling dissent, often by planting their own messages on the Web and presenting them as independent opinion.
Their actions are often informed by the art of online "astroturfing," a technique also popular with modern corporations and PR firms. While companies use it to engineer buzz around products and events, governments are using it to create the appearance of broad popular support for their ideology.
Their ultimate ambition may be to transform the Internet into a "spinternet," the vast and mostly anonymous areas of cyberspace under indirect government jurisdiction. The spinternet strategy could be more effective than censorship -- while there are a plenty of ways to access blocked Web sites, we do not yet have the means to distinguish spin from independent comment.
In China, the spinternet is being built by the "50 cent party," a loose online squad of tech-savvy operators loyal to the government who are paid to troll the Internet, find dissenting views and leave anonymous comments to steer all discussions in more "harmonious" directions. The "50 cents" in the name stands for their meager pay rates.
Plenty of local technology companies are also eager to help the government with various data-mining programs that identify dissenting views early and dispatch '50 cent party' operators to steer the discussion away from an antigovernment direction.
In Iran, the Revolutionary Guards recently announced their ambition to build their own spinternet by launching 10,000 blogs for the Basij, a paramilitary force under the Guards. This comes at a time when the Internet has become a major force in exposing corruption in the highest ranks of the Iranian leadership.
The Russian government may have found an even more ingenious way of suppressing the Internet's democratizing potential: cost. Many Internet users in Russia are still billed on the basis of the frequency and duration of their browsing sessions, and the state-owned All-Russia State Television and Radio Company has floated the idea of building a "social Internet," where users would pay nothing for state-approved Web sites.
Such an approach is already being tested in Belarus, where Internet users can browse the government's favored mouthpiece, "Belarus Today," for free -- that is, without paying their ISPs for Internet traffic, as they must for the country's few independent media outlets.
The rise of the spinternet suggests that the threats that the Internet poses to authoritarian regimes are far from unambiguous; some of these governments have turned quite adept at exploiting it for their own purposes.
So while it's important to continue documenting the direct repression of online journalists and bloggers, as organizations like Reporters Without Borders are doing, it is important to remember that there are other ways to qualify as an 'enemy of the Internet.'
30 Comments so far
Show AllDid Evgeny Morozov bother to check that the title of his article "Propaganda.com" would probably direct traffic to that domain?, and it doesn't have much to do with this topic.
The domain name belongs to David Lawrence who is a media artist, designer, producer, and researcher.
Strange that nobody's comments refer to this either.
RE: propaganda
Check out "The Mind Managers" (1973) by Herbert Schiller, he preceded Chomsky and Herman's "Manufacturing Consent" by 15 years! Much of it reads like it was describing media right now. He was way ahead of his time.
Reporters Without Borders is a highly suspect organization, controlled as it is by neo-con leaning zealots. As for this report, it is interesting only in that it doesn't mention the most high profile manipulation of the blogosphere originating from US and Israeli sources. During the Gaza war, this was made manifest in Israel's strategy to wage an information war as an integral part of its war efforts. In the US, you can only imagine the legion of blog commentators who are being paid to shill for corporations or the government (whether pro-Bush, or now, amazingly, pro-Obama).
I was shocked to find your statement accurate. As one of the founders was Rony Brauman, the former president of Doctors Without Borders, I had assumed that RWB was an ethical group. Thanks for the heads up. Anyone wondering as to the veracity of this charge shoudl read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders
Fiat currency is based entirely on belief in this currency having value. Two ways to assure that belief are to foster the fear of not having it and the love of never having enough of it. – Dr. Zimmerman Robert
What does this have to do with the article?
What does your apparent belligerence have to do with debate and discourse?
It's fundamental.
Common Dreams sees a lot of zionist thread manipulation. I don't mean sincere opinions shared. But endless posts on a thread that divert it from substantive discussion.
I just watched a 30-year old movie the other day: THX1138. Watch it and think about this article. Very scary indeed.
That various nefarious parties are attempting to obfuscate on the internet should come as no surprise whatsoever.
"Consider the source."
Authoritarian governments are just part of the problem. Though the author touched on the subject, the corporate spin here at home and their use of 'planters' is already commonplace. Corporations are much better financed and much more computer savvy than any government sponsored group like 50 cents.
And some people think Obama's internet savvy is a good thing.
one old atheist
New technologies, new ways to censor.
That's how it's always been.
We're foolish to think this does not go on here at C.D.!
The author hit on something important, though, in terms of just how completely pervasive this tactic can be, now that reliance on the internet for news and entertainment (or infotainment) has become a constant daily habit (blogs, cell phones, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and on and on).
Propaganda is everywhere.
Trust no one. (oh, OK, trust only a few).
There's a BBC news story about Chinese hackers breaking into computers of foreign embassies linked to Tibet.
I know a few of those spinternet folks post on here.
50 cents?
That's your price for selling out truth and common sense?
lol
The story about Chinese espionage could be disinfo rigged by North Atlantic Terror Organization agents.
right. even in the NYT article where i initially read about this, one techie type said it's impossible to determine whether or not the CIA or Russia (sic) is involved. i was rather suprised that, though buried deep w/in the article, the NYT would admit that the "china" part of this internet data mining thing might be total BS.
Seems that 50 cents goes a lot further in China.
It is instructive to note that all countries, with few exceptions, are authoritarian by definition (of government). It is the structure of the barrel and not the proverbial "few bad apples" that is the main source of most of the world's serious problems. Hierarchy may be good for the animal inside us humans but it is a disaster for humanity. What we need is a structure (barrel) that easily recognizes and promotes those "good by consensus" ideas that humanity easily comes up with and blocks those attempts by self-appointed hierarchies/tyrannies/bullies that high-jack humanity's agenda and replace it with their own.
We wouldn't have the internet if it weren't for government.
How does your statement relate to what the article talked about or any responses so far?
The authoritarians rue the day!
Could you be more specific?
The government developed the internet as a secure communications network in case of a nuclear attack. It was not intended to increase information flow to the public or to strengthen democracy. There were other ways to accomplish both of those, while requiring much less time and money.
"The government developed the internet as a secure communications network in case of a nuclear attack."
I'm not sure that is true. The early days of ARPANET (when I was involved) was point-to-point communication between computers. It was not until dynamic IP routing and TCP/IP was developed that the ARPANET "cloud" was seen as an alternative communications network to secure satellite links.
Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins - Native American proverb.
Do not allow yourself to be bullied. You are absolutely correct about the history of the internet which began as you suggest, as a point to point media for the exchange of data packets between researchers et al. When its usefulness in military and civilian emergency applications was noted there was government involvement in that area but the thrust remained private and increasingly profit oriented.
I really failt o understand why a discussion about the internet does not use the damn thing to find the truth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
http://w3.aces.uiuc.edu/AIM/scale/nethistory.html
It still remains that the initial idea of "communication between computers" was based on assisting military communications and not that of strengthening democracy by assisting citizens in their ability to communicate with one another. What would AT&T have said about that?
By the way, if you "was involved" with the "early days of ARPANET" why do you respond to my statement that "The government developed the internet as a secure communication network" with your statement of "I'm not sure that is true".
Under those circumstances wouldn't you be sure that my statement was true or false?
I thought the purpose of internet communication was the ability to reroute in case one "point-to-point" relay was taken out?
In the early 1970s, the military did not use "computers" except for stuff like computing ballistic trajectories, translating from Russian to English, code breaking, and had no vision for electronic dissemination of digital information. This is generally true of most military technology, as the military rarely provides fundamental break-throughs, instead riding on the coat tails of research in other nuclear, electronics and medical fields.
DARPA saw the work of AT&T on early email protocols and had the vision to ratchet it up, eventually giving us file transfer protocol, or ftp. All the work that was done developing ARPANET was done by universities, with some funding going into creating entities like the Open Source Foundation and small companies like Sun Microsystems. Except for using ARPANET to transfer seismic data that was used for monitoring underground nuclear weapons testing, the military still had no use for ARPANET until the 1990s (then called the internet), long after its commercial application was being realized.
My own work in the '70s and early '80s in "core wars", TCP/IP and X (even emacs for you geeks) was framed in an arms-control context, mostly of interest to ARPA and State, but of zero interest to DoD.
I used the wording "I'm not sure that is true" because I did not want to appear confrontational. It can be argued that almost all federal funding can be framed in terms of national security, and in this context, yes, research in the early internet was funded to advance US national security. But to say that this vision was created for the military is ridiculous.
Remember, "military intelligence" is a contradiction.
Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins - Native American proverb.
"I thought the purpose of internet communication was the ability to reroute in case one "point-to-point" relay was taken out?"
If your first post is rather ambiguous, here you are absolutely and unambiguously correct. Built on the principle of self-correcting distributed processing internet along with almost everything else follow Nature’s self-design of our brains and the whole of Life.
In this vain the leading post by Mr. Morosov and his reference to totalitarianisms is very shallow indeed. If Mr. Morosov will have any influence on his readership, the net result will be promotion of the very distractive and therefore destructive idea that “Propaganda is everywhere. Trust no one. (oh, OK, trust only a few)”. And that is exactly what happened – see few posts bellow. “Trust no one” preserve ruling class better than aircraft carrier groups and threat of nuclear annihilation.
We all on this and other so called “progressive” sites take it for granted that “propaganda” and “indoctrination” are pejorative words and it is not by coincidence. For “propaganda” and “indoctrination” is what creates humans and human societies as something much bigger than sum of components. Those who abhor indoctrination are indoctrinated to abhor it in order to be isolated from each other into disorganized mess and present no danger to rulers. The honor of sovereign individual is reward for their self-demise.
The good news is that rulers are not an exemption from the process and now we see them in free fall in the methodological vacuum, created by their elders. The best example of all is Banker-In-Chief Mr. Greenspan denouncing his philosophical background that worships “rational” individuals as the substrata of Almighty Free Market.
The most bizarre thing is that Mr. Greenspan’s ideas and by implication those of Larry Summers and the like are stemming from the same roots as ideas of V. I. Lenin. Those who are interested in more details contact v.purto@gmail.com.
Well again: It should be the government that fears the people and not the people fearing their government. At this particular point in time, one of the key ways we can restore the 'order of things', ie., making sure we have governments that fear the people, is of course to apprehend, convict and if it be the will of the people of the world, to execute all the key war criminals who operated within the U.S. Government...these are crimes and atrocities that must not go unpunished. It is obvious, that even now, these U.S. government war criminals regard themselves above the law--they still believe they are the ones who make the law, and this absolutely cannot be allowed to continue.
This global imperative, to restore people's law as proper government, exceeds even the imperative to face and deal with the vast environmental degradation that is threatening all forms of higher life on the planet.