Scholars of social media spend a lot of time studying Twitter. Twitter’s not the largest social network in the world – Facebook has at least twice as many users – but it’s massive and influential, particularly in the world of journalism, where smart practitioners have learned to report on stories using accounts from Twitter. And Twitter is something of a model organism for social media researchers. Most relationships and content on Twitter are public, while relationships and content on Facebook are often private. There’s an ecosystem of tools that use Twitter’s API to understand popular topics and networks of influence on Twitter, and countless research projects that use Twitter’s API to understand behavioral dynamics on social networks.

By contrast, there’s little scholarly research in English on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging network. (The top article on Google Scholar that comes up for a search on “twitter” has 637 cites. Top article for “sina weibo” has 9 cites.) The service is structurally similar to Twitter, with @usernames, hashtags, reposting, and URL shortening (using the t.cn site instead of t.co used by Twitter.) In one sense, the service is richer than Twitter, as posts can contain both 140 characters (which may contain significantly more information than 140 alphanumeric characters, as the 140 characters in Chinese are ideograms), and an embedded image or video. And Sina Weibo offers an API and supports an ecosystem of tools and applications that interact with Weibo data. Oh, and Sina Weibo has almost as many users as Twitter – 250 million in October 2011, as compared to roughly 300 million for Twitter at the end of 2011.

The obvious reason for the lack of English language research is that most English-speaking social media scholars don’t read Chinese very well. But this a lame excuse for ignoring a powerful media tool. John Kelly of Morningside Analytics doesn’t speak Persian, but he’s done groundbreaking research mapping links in the Iranian blogosphere. Colleagues at the Berkman Center are using Media Cloud (built by researchers who speak no Russian) to understand conversations taking place in Russian blogs versus those in state-influenced media. Language is a powerful, but not insurmountable, barrier to researching a media space. In both the cases I mention above, English-speaking researchers worked with translators to understand novel social media phenomena.

I sometimes wonder whether English-speaking scholars pay insufficient attention to Chinese social media due to an assumption that Chinese media has been censored to the point of sterility. I often speak about internet censorship, and American audiences in particular are quick to share their knowledge of the “great firewall”, the “fifty cent party” and other aspects of Chinese internet censorship. Because Chinese censorship has been widely reported in American media, I suspect many Americans know more about what’s not on the Chinese internet than what’s present. (David Talbot of Technology Review wrote an excellent article about “China’s Internet Paradox” which makes the case that the Chinese internet is freer and more complicated than most audiences think.)

One of the best ways to get a sense for the complexity of Sina Weibo is through WeiboScope, a tool created by Cedric Sam and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong. WeiboScope uses Sina Weibo’s API to collect posts from 200,000 Sina Weibo users. His sample is a subset of Sina Weibo’s most popular users, and contains only users who have at least 1000 followers. (His blog, the Rice Cooker, offers lots of details on building and deploying the system.) Taking advantage of the fact that many Sina Weibo posts include images, WeiboScope offers a visual version of Weibo “trending topics”, showing the images associated with the most retweeted posts.

A first glance at WeiboScope offers a sense for what’s hot in the Chinese internet. There’s lots of images of pop stars, and lots of pretty women showing off cleavage. Dig a bit further and there’s some hope for the xenophiles amongst us: internet memes that need to translation. Sam the Seagull – a bird who steals Doritos from an Aberdeen convenience store – has been kicking around the internet since at least 2007, and an animated GIF of the thieving bird is the second most popular post today. Other memes appear to be shared in realtime – this comparison of pollution in a Chinese city versus the skies above Australia featured on WeiboScope today, and also appeared on Reddit this morning.

Dig a bit deeper and there’s quite a bit of political content. Take this deeply disconcerting image:

The face of the mammarilly-enhanced cow is that of Niu Gensheng, CEO of Mengniu Dairy, one of the companies implicated in the 2008 Melamine scandal, where companies apparently added a toxic chemical to milk powder to increase protein content in their products. Mengniu recently revealed that some of their milk is testing positive for another toxin, apparently because cows were fed moldy feed. The company’s share price dropped 24% on this news today, knocking more than $1 billion of the company’s value. The text accompanying the Gensheng cartoon warns the executive of the dangers of angering 1.3 billion people. Another post, the most popular today, links to an article on Songshuhui.net that argues that Chinese people should stop drinking milk. While the article doesn’t explicitly mention Mengniu, it references scandals about milk, and it’s likely that the conversation about eschewing milk is directly related to the Mengniu news. Another popular post suggests a boycott of Mengniu, reminding readers that Saatchi & Saatchi, which had worked to rebrand the company, left after the tainted milk scandal of 2008.

I suspect some readers will note that the story I’m featuring about popular dissent is about consumer issues, not about direct opposition to the government. It’s worth remembering that popular protest often focuses more on economic and social issues than on overtly political issues – the Occupy movement in the US has been triggered by frustration with banks at least as much as it is with frustration with US politics. And there’s more directly political content on Weibo as well – this post talks about a family’s house that’s demolished by the government and a man’s protests in Beijing. This isn’t to say that Sina Weibo isn’t censored – it is. But the speed of Weibo means that stories can be widely discussed before censors declare a topic off limits, as we saw with extensive online coverage of the July high speed train collision. And the popularity of Weibo gives Chinese authorities a classic Cute Cats problem – censoring the service too heavily would alienate the 250 million people who use it, including the majority who are largely interested in scantily dressed celebrities.

I should note: I don’t speak or read Chinese. That means that my interpretation of the Mengniu cow could be deeply mistaken. But it also means that it’s possible to puzzle out a breaking story in Chinese media using WeiboScope, Google Translate and a few web searches.

Here’s hoping tools like WeiboScope will help make the Chinese internet seem like less of a foreign land and more like a near neighbor.

Oiwan Lam at Global Voices has posted about online activism around Mengniu, with some wonderful (and generally less disturbing!) images. And An Xiao offers a great reaction post to the ideas I’m putting forward here, including a clever inversion of the Cute Cat Theory: “with Chinese political memes, the cute cats are the activist message.” Very interesting, something I’m still digesting.

It’s a few days after Christmas, and if you overextended yourself in buying gifts for your family and friends, you may be thinking about options to tide you over until the next payday. For years, payday lenders have offered short term loans at extortionate interest rates to people desperate for cash. Some loans are tied to collateral: the title to an automobile or deed to a house. Others offer unsecured “cash advances”, usually requiring evidence that a borrower is employed and that paychecks are deposited into an individual’s bank account. Borrowers secure the loans with a check to the lender dated in the future, or by giving the lender permission to debit from their checking accounts.

Payday loans charge extremely high interest rates, as high as 400-800% annually. The theory behind these rates is that they’ll be paid back in a few weeks, so finance charges aren’t competitive with more conventional bank loans. But payday lenders allow borrowers to “roll over” loans, using a new loan to repay a previous loan – a paper on payday lending coauthored by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren explains that as much of 90% of the profits in the payday lending industry comes from loans rolled over 5 or more times. When these loans extend for months or longer, their interest rates mean that the cost of borrowing rapidly exceeds the initial sum borrowed.

In a few American states, these high interest rates violate usury laws, and payday lending is prohibited. The Pentagon, worried about the impact payday lenders were having on military families, asked Congress to prohibit this form of exploitative lending to military personel. The Talent Amendment, passed in 2007, helps protect servicemen and women… but civilians are still fair game. And while the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was intended in part to help regulate payday lending, lobbying from payday lenders has helped keep the business from being one of CFPB’s early priorities. (Law professor Nathalie Martin makes a compelling case that payday lending should be an early priority for CFPB. But CFPB’s website makes no mention of payday or title lenders.)

Home for the holidays, I’ve been catching up on Top Chef reruns on Bravo. Watching late night satellite TV exposes one to some unusual ads. I saw an extraordinary ad last night: A handsome Native American man in a suit tells me that, if I need money transferred to my bank account right now, Western Sky Financial may be able to help me. His name is Thomas Morgan, and he warns, “Yes, the money’s expensive, but there’s no collateral required, and you can keep the cost down by paying it as fast as you can.”

He’s not kidding about the money being expensive. If I borrow $1500 from Western Sky, $500 is immediately reclaimed by the company as a loan fee. I pay 234% interest on the loan, payable in 24 payments of almost $200 each. In exchange for $1000, I pay $4,756.56 over the next two years. Larger loans offer lower loan fees and interest rates, but the interest rates start to create truly surreal situations. Borrow $5,075 and the 84 scheduled payments add up to $40,872.72.

It’s not a coincidence that Western Sky’s spokesman is Native American. The commercial and website both emphasize that the business is
“owned wholly by an individual Tribal Member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and is not owned or operated by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe or any of its political subdivisions. WESTERN SKY FINANCIAL is a Native American business operating within the exterior boundaries of the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, a sovereign nation located within the United States of America.”

That’s a fascinating legal construction. It’s important for Western Sky to assert its status as a Native American-owned business so it can assert the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Court as the legal jurisdiction for the loan. And Western Sky’s default loan agreement forces borrowers to waive their rights to a jury trial, and to seek arbitration within the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Nation’s jurisdiction. Borrowers also waive the ability to participate in a class action lawsuit, and certain rights of discovery in the case of a lawsuit. It’s possible to opt out of this clause, but only through a convoluted procedure involving a written request.

(I don’t have a good answer to why the legal verbiage makes it clear that it’s an individual, not a tribal business – my guess is that if high-rate lending were an official tribal business, it might come under the purview of a federal regulator… but I’d be grateful for anyone’s insights on why Western Sky insists that this is an individual tribal member’s business.)

In the case of Western Sky, the lender is Martin Webb, who is a member of the South Dakota-based Cheyenne River Sioux tribe. Courts in West Virginia have determined that Webb’s legal status doesn’t protect his business from state and federal regulation, at least as regards loans to West Virginia consumers. (Western Sky’s website won’t let you apply for a loan if you are from West Virginia. The company faces similar bans in Maryland, California and, ironically, South Dakota.) And the Federal Trade Commission, while not ruling on whether Western Sky is based in Cheyenne River Sioux territory or South Dakota, has ordered Webb to stop collecting on debts by attempting to illegally garnish customers’ wages.

Perhaps it’s only fitting that Native Americans – cheated out of their lands by unfair treaties, politically and economically isolated since the foundation of the United States – are seeking economic development by preying on America’s least fortunate. Businesses run using sovereignty include casinos, discount cigarette sales and payday lending, all businesses that target vulnerable populations in the US. That’s the case, eloquently made, by Thomas E. Gamble, chief of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, which is involved in several lending businesses. In response to a request for information from reporters from the Center for Public Integrity, Gamble argues that tribes exiled to remote and desolate areas have had to find creative ways to develop “a diverse economy that can provide jobs, housing, education, infrastructure, health care and other vital services for our members.” How many of the 3,500 members of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma are profiting from their lending business is unclear, but Gamble argues that by permitting lenders to operate within tribal lands, “is no different that South Dakota passing favorable laws in order to attract Citigroup and the like to set up niche industries within its jurisdiction.”

(Here, Gamble is referring to the exodus of banks like Citibank to South Dakota in the late 1970s. Under heavy lobbying from banks, South Dakota overturned its usury laws, allowing banks to issue credit cards with high interest rates. A Supreme Court decision in 1978, Marquette National Bank v. First of Omaha Service Corp., allowed banks to “export” the interest rates of the states they were based in to states where they had customers. States responded with “parity laws”, allowing locally chartered banks to offer competitive rates… so their banks didn’t all decamp to South Dakota. Gamble is correct that South Dakota made these changes to attract business and that these changes were legal. But he’s also making the case that his tribe should be allowed to engage in the sorts of practices that have created financial crises for millions of Americans, faced with punitive interest rates and fees from their credit card issuers.)

I’d find Gamble’s argument slightly more compelling if it were clear that his tribal members were the main beneficiaries of usurious loans. Generally, they’re not. Payday lenders are remarkably creative in finding loopholes in state laws that prohibit usury, and one of the most recently exploited loopholes is “rent a tribe“. Lenders based outside of Native American lands strike agreements with tribal members to “rent” their sovereignty in exchange for a small share of proceeds. A suit from the Colorado Attorney General uses financial documents to demonstrate that the tribes are generally making about 1% of proceeds from the lending business in exchange for “owning” the companies. The rest of the proceeds go to the lenders, whose offices are generally far from tribal lands.

Those proceeds go to guys like Scott Tucker.

Scott Tucker, race car driver, entrepreneur, apparent scumbag.

Chief Gamble’s letter in defense of Native American lending refers to AMG Services, a “tribal business” that manages several payday lending operations. Center for Public Integrity and CBS argue that AMG Services is actually run by Scott Tucker, the alleged gentleman pictured above. Gamble states that Tucker is an “employee” of AMG Services, and Tucker refuses to speak about his relationship to the Miami Tribe, citing a confidentiality agreement. CPI’s investigation discovered that Tucker and his brother were the only parties authorized to write checks on behalf of AMG, suggesting that the Miami tribe’s “ownership” of the company is nominal at best.

The CPI investigation finds that Tucker is one of the pioneers in using “rent a tribe” to protect otherwise prohibited payday lending businesses. Tucker is a convicted felon, who served time in Leavenworth in the early 1990s for mail fraud associated with a bogus loan scheme. After his release, Tucker turned to payday lending, managing a set of shell companies from an office in Overland Park, Kansas. When regulators in Colorado began investigating a Tucker-owned lender, Cash Advance, they faced an interesting challenge: the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and the Santee Sioux Tribe announced that they owned the lenders, arguing that this put the business’s operations outside of Colorado’s subpoena powers. A Colorado court responded by citing Tucker for civil contempt.

Oddly, the citation for civil contempt hasn’t cramped Tucker’s style. He maintains an $8 million home in Aspen in his wife’s name, though AMG Services (the “tribal business”) pays the property taxes. And he likes to drive fast cars. When Tucker was recently ticketed for speeding in Olathe, Kansas, AMG donated $1000 to the campaign of the Kansas district attorney whose office processes tickets. In an odd coincidence, Tucker’s ticket was turned into a parking offense, leaving his driving record clean.

It’s important that Tucker’s driving record stay clean because driving is his passion and pastime. A breathless 2010 Wall Street Journal article celebrates Tucker’s participation in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a massively popular auto race described as “the Super Bowl of international sports car racing”. The Journal – which has never met a bank it doesn’t like – describes Tucker as “a wealthy private investor from Leawood, Kansas” and marvels at the fact that Tucker apparently has “world-class talent” at motorsports. Nowhere does the WSJ article mention Tucker’s felonious past, or suggest that his driving skills may have developed as an attempt to outrun bank regulators.

A recent article on Tucker’s Level 5 Motorsports notes that Microsoft Office has recently signed on as the company’s chief sponsor. I guess Microsoft looks more sightly on a racing jumpsuit than the logos of payday lending firms. And I wonder whether Microsoft’s marketing department knows they’re supporting the hobby of a man whose money is made by bankrupting vulnerable borrowers.

I started writing this post because I saw Western Sky’s ad and immediately concluded, “That’s got to be illegal.” What’s remarkable, of course, is that it’s not necessarily illegal. Four of 50 American states have taken action against Western Sky, and at least one (Colorado) have attempted to cripple or shut down Tucker’s businesses. But it’s going to take a long time for 50 states attorneys general to bring proceedings against these semi-virtual lenders. And it wouldn’t be surprising to see lenders attempting to service this market across international borders.

One of the most interesting businesses in this space is Wonga.com, an English company that offers short-term loans online, much like Western Sky does. Like Western Sky, Wonga charges very high interest rates – their website advertises a 4214% annual percentage rate. Unlike Western Sky, Wonga claims to be a responsible lender, and does not seek to extend loans beyond their initial term (which, remember, is where payday lenders generally make their profits.) They give money to Kiva.org, and have taken investment from responsible venture capital firms and from one of the UK’s leading charities. They appear to be expanding and now operate in South Africa. It’s hard for me to know whether Wonga competing in the US against Western Sky and others would be a good or bad thing.

When I tweeted about Western Sky last night, a couple of people responded by arguing that if payday lending is too closely regulated, it will simply send the business underground. The opposite seems to be happening at present. Payday lenders have traditionally targeted the poor, and neighborhoods in the US where poverty is endemic tend to feature check cashing, auto title and payday loan businesses. (Nathalie Martin’s article notes that in states where payday lending is legal, there are more payday lenders than Starbucks franchises.) Businesses like Wonga claim to be targeting a wealthier set of customers who see high-cost loans as a convenience. (Why Wonga loans would be more convenient than a cash advance on a credit card, which though expensive, tend to cost less than these loans, is unclear to me.) Perhaps “overregulation” would mean a rebirth of illegal loan sharking – in the meantime, the appearance of TV ads for high-interest loans suggests that legalized loan sharking may be becoming more socially acceptable.

If you’re considering a payday loan or an online, high-interest loan, please read this article first. It’s from the Center for Responsible Lending, and offers a number of less expensive alternatives, including cash advances from employers, cash advances on credit cards, consumer loans from credit unions, payment plans from creditors and military loans.

Kudos to Center for Public Integrity and CBS News, and specifically to David Heath, Laura Strickler and Armen Keteyian for their stories on payday lending and the Native American connection. I cited these four stories (1, 2, 3, 4) in this post. It’s a reminder of the importance of investigative journalism in exposing complex stories like this one.

Daniel Castro of The Information Technology & Innovation Fund recently published a paper supporting the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) currently being debated in congress. In that report, he claims that research performed by us supports the domain name system (DNS) filtering mechanisms mandated by SOPA. This claim is a distortion of our work. We disagree with the use of our study to make the point that DNS-based Internet filtering works and that we should therefore use it as a means of stopping websites from distributing copyrighted content. The data we collected answer a completely different set of questions in a completely different context.

Among other provisions that seek to control the sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet, SOPA, if enacted, would call upon the U.S. government to require that Internet service providers remove from their DNS servers the names of any sites that either infringe copyright directly or merely “facilitate” copyright infringement. So, for example, the government could require that ISPs remove the name “twitter.com” from their DNS servers if twitter.com was not being sufficiently aggressive in preventing its users from tweeting information about places to download copyrighted materials. This practice is known as DNS filtering. DNS filtering is one of the most common modes of Internet-based censorship. As we and our collaborators in the OpenNet Initiative have shown over the past decade, practices of this sort are used extensively in autocratic countries, including China and Iran, to prevent access to a range of sites offensive to the governments of those countries.

Opponents of SOPA have argued that the DNS filtering, even though it will have a number of harmful effects on the technical and political structure of the Internet, will not be effective in preventing users from accessing the blocked sites. Mr. Castro cites our research as evidence that SOPA’s mandate to filter DNS will be effective. He quotes our finding that at most 3% of users in certain countries that substantially filter the Internet use circumvention tools and asserts that “presumably the desire for access to essential political, historical, and cultural information is at least equal to, if not significantly stronger than, the desire to watch a movie without paying for it. Yet only a small fraction of Internet users employ circumvention tools to access blocked information, in part because many users simply lack the skills or desire to find, learn and use these tools.”

In our report, we looked at three sets of censorship circumvention tools: complex, client-based tools like Tor; paid VPNs; and web proxies. We estimated usage of those three classes of tools. We used reports from the client tool developers, a survey to gather usage data from VPN operators and used data from Google Analytics to estimate usage of web proxy tools. Counting all three classes of tools, we estimated as many as 19 million users a month of circumvention tools. Given the large number of users in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other states where filtering is endemic, this represents a fairly small percentage of internet users in those countries; 19 million people represents about 3% of the users in countries where internet filtering is pervasive. We actually believe that 3% figure is high, as some of the tools we study are used by users in open societies to evade corporate or university firewalls, not just to evade government censorship.

We stand behind the findings in our study (with reservations that we detail in the paper), but we disagree with the way that Mr. Castro applies our findings to the SOPA debate. His presumption that people will work as hard or harder to access political content than they do to access entertainment content deeply misunderstands how and why most people use the internet. Far more users in open societies use the Internet for entertainment than for political purposes; it is unreasonable to assume different behaviors in closed societies. Our research offers the depressing conclusion that comparatively few users are seeking blocked political information and suggests that the governments most successful in blocking political content ensure that entertainment and social media content is widely available online precisely because users get much more upset about blocking the ability watch movies than they do about blocking specific pieces of political content.

Rather than comparing usage of circumvention tools in closed societies to predict the activities of a given userbase, Mr. Castro would do better to consider the massive userbase of tools like bit torrent clients, which would make for a far cleaner analogy to the problem at hand. Likewise, the long line of very popular peer-to-peer sharing tools that have been incrementally designed to circumvent the technical and political measures used to prevent sharing copyrighted materials are a stronger analogy than our study of users in authoritarian regimes seeking to access political content.

Second, our research has consistently shown that those who really wish to evade Internet filters can do so with relatively little effort. The problem is that these activities can be very dangerous in certain regimes. Even though our research shows that relatively few people in autocratic countries use circumvention tools, this does not mean that circumvention tools are not crucial to the dissident communities in those countries. 19 million people is not large in relation to the population of the Internet, but it is still a lot of people absolutely who have freer access to the Internet through the tools. We personally know many people in autocratic countries for whom these tools provide a crucial (though not perfect) layer of security for their activist work. Those people would be at much greater risk than they already are without access to the tools, but in addition to mandating DNS filtering, SOPA would make many circumvention tools illegal. The single biggest funder of circumvention tools has been and remains the U.S. government, precisely because of the role the tools play in online activism. It would be highly counter-productive for the U.S. government to both fund and outlaw the same set of tools.

Finally, our decade-long study of Internet filtering and circumvention has documented the many problems associated with Internet filtering, not its overall effectiveness. DNS filtering is by necessity either overbroad or underbroad; it either blocks too much or too little. Content on the Internet changes its place and nature rapidly, and DNS filtering is ineffective when it comes to keeping up with it. Worse, especially from a First Amendment perspective, DNS filtering ends up blocking access to enormous amounts of perfectly lawful information. We strongly resist the claim that our research, and that of our collaborators, makes the case in favor of DNS-based Internet filtering.

Links:

Mr. Castro’s report may be found here:

http://www.itif.org/publications/pipasopa-responding-critics-and-finding-path-forward

with the reference to our work on p. 8.

The study that is being misused by Mr. Castro is here:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2010/Circumvention_Tool_Usage.

The findings of our decade-long studies are documented in three books, published MIT Press and available freely online in their entirety at:

http://access.opennet.net/

- Rob Faris, John Palfrey, Hal Roberts, Jill York, and Ethan Zuckerman

Center for Civic Media meetings start with an icebreaker question: you introduce yourself, and tell us whether you prefer pirates or ninjas, homemade or canned cranberry sauce. You offer your favorite protest chant or tell us what percent (“I am the 99%”) you identify with. Yesterday, on seeing two of Civic’s finest dressed in argyle, I asked people to propose a Civic Media dress code.

The suggestions were wide-ranging and included Jeff Warren’s suggestion of facial tattoos that serve as achievement badges, Nathan Matias’s proposed adoption of Madeline Albright’s “pin code” and Molly Sauter offered a suggestion for remixable, snarky t-shirts.

My favorite suggestion was Lorrie LeJeune’s proposal of a Civic media tartan. (Since Lorrie weaves and spins, as well as writes, edits, makes jewelry, builds guitars and plays mandolin, it’s possible she is weaving a Civic tartan right now.) It was widely observed that we needn’t select a single tartan – instead, we could create a set of tartans that functioned like QR codes, encoding information for anyone capable of comprehending the code.

I’m home sick today, feeling like the cold I’m fighting is perfectly justified given my travel and sleep schedule this fall. (Spontaneous human combustion would also likely have been an appropriate bodily response to the strains of this fall.) So I’ve had some time to think about how we might actually implement a Civic tartan code.

First, some quick comments on QR codes:

- They’re very cool. It’s wonderful that Densu Wave in 1994 figured out such a compact way to encode a surprisingly large amount of data into machine readable form. And there are certainly lots of clever ways to use them, not just for labeling auto parts, but for bridging between the real and digital worlds, tagging physical objects and spaces with unique identifiers and URLs. (See Civic’s Timenesia project for one cool way to use QR codes to tag reality.)

- They’re ugly as sin, and also something of a fashion statement. Commenting on posters from a recent Occupy rally, Sasha Constanza-Chock noted that QR codes on many of the posters and wondered – since most of the codes translate as URLs – whether it wouldn’t be easier simply to put the human-readable URLs on the posters instead. “It seems like the QR code primarily signifies you as the sort of person technologically sophisticated enough to be using QR codes”

There’s a certain charm to having codes that are machine-readable but not human readable, I guess – you can wear http://goatse.cx on your shirt and disturb anyone foolish enough to read the code with their phone. But I suspect fashion statements like haute couture bodices decorated with QR codes are the sort of idea with very little staying power.

- They’re killing kittens. As Scott Stratten explains in this helpful video, most QR codes are misused, and each time designers misuse them, a kitten dies. It’s time we think of the kittens.

Embedding data into physical spaces is a cool idea. But it would be great if we could do so in a way that’s pretty, and at least partially human readable.

Like tartans. Prior to the 19th century, tartans were associated with different regions of Scotland, colored using local dyes to local weaver’s preferences. After the publication of the (wholly fictional) Vestiarium Scoticum in 1842, tartans became associated with specific clans, and it became possible to identify members of some families by the particular tartan they wore. Military units and businesses have created specific tartans, as do most US states, and there are now between 7000 and 14,000 “registered” tartans available.

The Bay State tartan, my state’s official plaid. You may now understand why I prefer my clan tartan.

It’s pretty obvious from looking at a tartan that you’ve got the potential to store a great deal of information within the design of the pattern. The Bay State tartan features 24 stripes before repeating. Each can be a different width and color. With a couple dozen colors to choose from, and stripes ranging from one to 64 stitches, you’ve got 36,864 patterns, or slightly more than 15 bits of information. All well and good, but not enough information to encode a URL.

QR codes can include URLs stored as alphanumeric characters – the QR codes we see most often can support 35-77 alphanumeric characters. That’s a lot of data – ~8.9×10^108 possible combinations, which would require either really wide tartans, or very subtle color variations. The problem is more tractable if we try to represent a shortened URL, using a service like is.gd or bit.ly. Yes, this means our tartan scanner will need to detect color and stripe width, then consult bit.ly before using the domain name service to resolve our website… but remember, QR readers are using the DNS system to turn their codes into websites, in part because encoding IP addresses doesn’t work well anymore now that a site can support thousands of independent domains.

bit.ly produces URLs that look like this: http://bit.ly/t658ko – that URL leads to Center for Civic Media at http://civic.mit.edu. To slightly oversimplify, the service turns each URL it encounters into the next of a sequence of numbers. Rather than use decimal numbers, they use a base-62 system (0-9, A-Z, a-z), which allows them to represent almost 57 billion numbers with only six characters. 57 billion is vastly smaller than the total number of possible URLs, but in practical terms, it works because people haven’t used the service 57 billion times.

Now we just need something capable of producing 57 billion different tartans.

Enter Tartanmaker.com. This lovely online service allows you to design simple tartans to be used as backgrounds for your webpages. You can create three stripes of width from 1-10, using hexadecimal notation to specify colors. That gives you 167 million or so options per stripe (256^3 colors times 10 widths), or roughly 4.722 x 10^24 possible tartans. While that more than satisfies our information needs, most of those colors are going to be too subtle for the human eye to distinguish.

Turns out we can solve our problem using only websafe colors. With three stripes chosen from 216 websafe colors, we get almost 10 billion combinations. Tartanmaker offers us two other options – three thread widths (which basically scale the pattern) and two orientations (horizonal versus diagonal), which bring us up to over 59 billion combinations, just what we need to represent bit.ly URLs.

If we actually wanted to do this, we’d need a good algorithm to map bit.ly’s base-62 numbers to a combination of 3 thread sizes, 2 orientations, and three stripes, each of 216 colors and 10 widths. We might get very clever and figure out how to have tartans darken over time, using darker colors as we move through our list of unique identifiers. And we’d need Tartanmaker to offer an API so we could take an URL, call bit.ly, then call Tartanmaker and produce appropriate outputs. Finally, for this to actually be useful, we’d need to program a webcam to distinguish between color shades and stripe widths.

But it makes me deeply happy to know that Civic Media tartan could exist, and could lead an appropriately equipped smartphone to our site. And it makes me want to build a tartan translator, if only to figure out what URLs I’m advertising when I wear my flannel shirts.

John Kelly, chief scientist of Morningside Analytics, makes pretty diagrams that feature multicolored dots. The pretty dots frequently tell complicated and subtle stories about the spread of ideas in online media spheres, particularly the blogosphere. (Tragically, I don’t have Kelly’s slides for the talk, which means I’ll be trying to channel a very visual talk here…) He maps social media citations and studies the resulting topologies to understand the spread of ideas.

To understand what conversations are taking place about fact checking, he takes a “semantic slice” of the network. He looks for markers – keywords, URLs and metadata – and offers a “relevance metric” for bloggers to identify the bloggers he believes are most relevant in the space. Then he plots them with a size that shows how well-linked a blog is, and uses a physics model to cluster based on linkage.

Kelly then uses “attentive clustering” to color the graph – people who link to the same sources are colored the same way. There’s a clear cluster around conservative politics, and a visible cluster that’s conservative, pro-Israel. There’s a fringe group he calls “Islam critics”. On the other side, he sees clusters of progressive insiders, progressive outsiders, and progressive media critics. Other clusters are apolitical – economics, law, education, health and healthcare. Web cultures – Gizmodo, Make magazine – are also represented in the map. And there’s a cluster of journalism criticism, which Kelly notes is uncomfortably close to people who watch celebrities.

He characterizes the progressive critics as reasonably well connected to other conversations, and the conservative conversation as largely separate. Unsupriringly, a site like Newsbusters.org gets lots of attention from the conservative cluster… but does get some links from the big dogs on the progressive side. Factcheck.org is the mirror image – the big conservatives, and most people in the progressive space. Politifact is similar. Media Matters is further out towards the progressive fringe, though gets attention from big conservatives. Politicalcorrection.org is even further left.

MRC.org is mainly linked from the right, but gets good response from the journalism commentary cluster. Washington Post’s Factchecker blog gets equal attention from the left and the right, but lots of love from the journalists. CJR is loved by the left and the journalists, and invisible to the right. Sunlight Foundation has lots of traction in the tech community and is stronger thre than in political circles. For a comparison, Kelly offers snopes.org, which seems to be equally noted across the board.

Healthnewsreview.org, a site that focuses on corrections in the health and healthcare space, has excellent traction in one space, but almost no influence in other parts of the mediasphere. This offers some interesting implications for niche communication strategies, but offers some worries about information crossing from subject domains into the main conversation.

Kelly graphs 1000 top sites in terms of who links to them. The graph has two dimensions: left/right and political versus mainstream. The political fact sites range from the left to the right, but are strongly linked to by political sites. Some odd exceptions – CJR is left and fairly mainstream, while NPR is quite central and fairly mainstream.

Morningside has also looked, though in less depth, at a set of Twitter accounts that follow fact checking organizations. They picked a set of key fact checking twitter feeds and grabbed all of their followers. They looked for linkage and clustering and used k-core analysis to choose a densely connected set. What results is a space where conservatives appear to follow political fact checking more closely than progressives. (I’m not entirely clear on how Kelly is determining left-right within this set – I assume he’s hand-checking the clusters that emerge in his analysis, which is his standard operating method.)

Even a highly partisan site like politicancorrection.org has substantial followership from the right. Kelly drills down and sees clusters of followers in the Occupy movement, in the union and labor space, and in the eco/green space, as well as beltway insiders and people who study media. But he also sees a cluster of followers of conservative politicians, and a cluster around conservative media personalities.

How might we explain this? It could be that Twitter is where conservatives are making their stand in social media. Conservatives may be watching Twitter very closely and responding to each of these fact check interventions. It’s hard to know, though, as Kelly notes that Twitter is a space of “non-authentic actors”, both automated bots and coordinated groups of humans.

Lucas Graves, a doctoral student at Columbia and a research fellow at the New America Foundation, frames a discussion on fact checking by offering a detailed landscape of the fact checking movement. (That discussion is under Chatham House rules, but Lucas has been kind enough to allow me to post notes on his presentation.) He suggests we consider three groups of fact checkers:

– Reporters at organizations like the Associated Press or New York Times who conduct occasional fact checking after a debate. We can consider these people professional journalists engaged, part-time, in fact checking.

– Full-time, dedicated fact checkers like Politifact, Dactcheck.org, and the Washintgon Post’s fact check columns, which Lucas calls “the elite fact checkers”.

– Political and partisan fact checkers, like Media Matters and Newsbusters. They’re engaged, in part as media critics. But they also do work that can be very high quality fact checking.

All three types of fact checking appear to be on the rise. So Graves suggests we consider the origins of the movement. Some trace fact checking to the 1988 US presidential campaign and the Willie Norton ads designed to damage Dukakis. Others trace it to Ronald Reagan’s presidency and his gift for generating misinformation. Graves invites us to consider I.F. Stone’s newsletter, produced through 1950s and 1960s.

Stone was a muckraking journalist who worked within mainstream print journalism early in his career, and who – after being blacklisted – published a newsletter titled “The Weekly”. Graves shows us what he believes is the first fact checking box. It appears in a 1958 issue of The Weekly, and it begins with a statement from Dr. Edward Teller, where he contends that the global risk of nuclear fallout is equivalent to the dangers of being an ounce overweight, or smoking a cigarette a month. It’s followed by an authoritative rebuttal from an established source, in this case, four paragraphs from Bulletin of Atomic Scientist. Graves points out that Stone was, by no one’s account, an objective journalist. He wore his liberal politics on his sleeve, and believed in calling out hypocrisy and deception where he found it.

Is fact checking a specialized genre of news practice? Or should every reporter fact check? Brooke Gladstone has argued that the only way to check the spread of lies in the media is to fact check incessantly, in each paragraph they publish.Is it plausible to produce journalism in this way? Should we accept a system in which one article tells us what politicians said in a debate, and another, separate article that tells us which of those statements were true?

How big is the fact checking space? Graves has searched for the term “fact check” in Nexis – he finds 153 mentions in 2004, versus 371 in 2010. At the same time, he sees a decrease in the term “ad watch”, and a brief spike around “truth squad” in 2008. There appears to be a trend towards increasing fact checking identified as such, and some convergence on the term “fact check”, and a move away from only fact checking political ads.

fact checks appear most often in September and October – in 2008, 82% of fact checks appeared in those months. But that figure dropped to roughly half in 2010.

Using this set of data – stories that mentioned the phrase “fact check”, Graves notes that the term appeared primarily in dedicated fact checking articles in 2000 and 2004, but is increasingly common in “ordinary” articles since then. Still, the term appears most often in dedicated fact checking articles.

He returns the discussion to I.F. Stone to ask what role partisan fackcheckers serve. He asks us to consider a claim made by rightwing candidates and pundits that Obama had called Americans “lazy” while speaking at a business forum in Honolulu. Elite fact checkers agreed that the claim was false. Politifact called a statement made by Politifact “mostly false”. The Washington Post Fact Checker gave the Perry statement 4 Pinnochios, their strongest rating of untruth. fact check.org characterized the statement as “lazy rhetoric”, with Obama’s words taken out of context, intended to mislead.

Media Matters analyzed the claim, focusing on ten instances where conservative pundits, mostly speaking on Fox News, offered the same claim. It was presented as media criticism, Graves notes, but the analysis was indistinguishable from “elite” analysis. So do we evaluate Media Matters simply by considering the quality of their work, or do we take seriously their political biases?

One answer is to consider whether the fact checking is successful in reaching across political divides. Politifact and fact check.org are both frequently cited by CNN, and by less partisan networks. Partisan networks (Fox News, MSNBC) mention the two, but they’re each responsible for less than 1/8 of the mentions. Media Matters and Newsbusters are very rarely mentioned on less partisan networks – 2/3rds of their mentions are on the partisan news sites. And the biggest reach for Media Matters is on Fox News, which specializes in attacking their coverage.

Robert Neuwirth is bringing new insights to familiar (for him, unfamiliar for most of us) territory in his book, “Stealth of Nations“. His previous work, “Shadow Cities” was a plea to take squatter cities and informal settlements seriously, rather than dismissing them as slums. (My review of Shadow Cities is here.) His mission in this new book is for us to reconsider the “informal economy”, which he rebrands “System D”.

“System D” is an abbreviation for “l’economie de la débrouillardise”, a tern coined in French-speaking Africa to refer to a system of “resourceful and ingenious” people who make their livings outside the formal, taxed and regulated economy. Neuwirth rejects the term “informal” because the coiner of that phrase, British anthropologist Keith Hart, included the criminal underground in his term, “the informal economy”. Neuwirth wants to celebrate the energy and ingenuity of people who make their living outside formal economic structure, but distinguish those he celebrates from those who are selling drugs or running prostitution rings. The heroes of System D may avoid taxes, smuggle goods or operate without permits, but Neuwirth sees them not as criminals but as hardworking people trying to make a living in systems that are broken and corrupt.

Neuwirth’s great strength is as a traveler and storyteller. Like “Shadow Cities”, “Stealth of Nation” is packed chock full with stories from the communities he’s visited in Brazil, Paraguay, Nigeria, China and the United States. We meet street merchants selling pens and cakes in São Paolo, a handbag manufacturer in Guangzhou and the baker of high-end (if unlicensed) olive oil cake in New York City. He takes a particularly deep dive in Lagos, a megalopolis he describes as “a System D city”, where virtually no infrastructures are provided by the state, and where basic services like power, drinking water and public transit are provided by private industry and workers’ collectives, who build systems that function with limited licensing, taxation or oversight.

This wealth of narratives helps make the case that System D is massive and pervasive. Working from numbers from the World Bank and using the insights of Austrian economist Friedrich Schneider, Neuwirth offers an estimate that System D is responsible for roughly $10 trillion in goods and services bought and sold annually. That makes “Bazaristan” the second largest economy in the world, behind the United States. He further argues that System D provides employment for a majority of adults in many developing nations. Whether or not we approve of the activities of System D, Neuwirth argues, we need to take it seriously because of the large number of individuals it impacts.

Neuwirth’s inquiry is extremely broad in scope, both in terms of the subjects he considers and the timescale he examines. Chapters look at phenomena like piracy and counterfeit goods, and smuggling across international borders, which Neuwirth examines primarily via Paraguay’s Ciudad del Este, a urban center that exists primarily so Brazilian citizens – and merchants – can avoid paying taxes. To provide a historical context for these sorts of trade, Neuwirth calls on classical economists, including Adam Smith, as well as histories from the 18th century to demonstrate the ongoing demonization and dismissal of System D merchants. For me, these excursions into the past are less enjoyable that the wealth of contemporary examples he provides, though they’re helpful in establishing that System D is a very old system as well as a new one.

The danger in both of Neuwirth’s books is that he loves his subject so much, he occasionally celebrates it uncritically. “Shadow Cities” occasionally read to me as a marketing brochure for Brazilian favelas, suggesting we abandon traditional urban planning and invite urban entrepreneurs to rewire the electrical grid to meet their needs. “Stealth of Nations” is more careful, and Neuwirth engages with the ways in which Lagos can be a nightmare for the people who live there, not just a creative laboratory for urban innovation. At the same time, he urges us to take seriously the miracle that Lagos works at all, a miracle that can be hard to see underneath the diesel smog, caught in an hours-long go-slow.

This appreciation for the complex systems that compose System D can push Neuwirth towards a sort of conservatism that’s familiar to readers of Jane Jacobs. Neuwirth’s Robert Moses is Lagos State governor Babatunde Fashola, who Neuwirth lambasts for clearing street merchants from busy intersections and setting up formalized markets in inconveniently located parts of the city. Neuwirth is right to point out that Fashola, and other urban planners, have a tendency to undervalue the contributions of street merchants, and tend to propose unworkable alternatives to current systems. But celebrating contemporary Lagos in the ways that Jacobs celebrated the Lower East Side seems to miss two critical points. First, to the extent that Lagos works right now, it just barely works – Neuwirth acknowledges as much when he points out that some of Lagos’s most impenetrable traffic jams are caused by the tendency of merchants to turn roadways into markets. Second, Lagos is growing at a ferocious pace, and Fashola seems to be taking seriously the challenge of allowing the city to continue functioning as a megalopolis, likely to soon be one of the world’s largest cities. One possible response to Neuwirth’s criticism is to point out that Fashola was just re-elected with 81% of the vote in a poll most observers saw as free and fair.

Neuwirth is a journalist and documentarian, not an economist or an urban planner, and it may be unreasonable to ask him to solve the thorny problem of bringing System D and the formal economy into closer partnership. Neuwirth examines Hernando de Soto’s work on formalizing System D through property rights. De Soto’s most helpful intervention is the observation that the poor have wealth – homes, businesses, assets – but few ways to access them. By creating a paper trail, establishing ownership over houses and other real estate, de Soto argues that the poor can access their wealth, borrowing against their homes and using the loans to start new businesses. Neuwirth looks at de Soto’s native Peru and concludes that formalization hasn’t done much to help System D. The problem is the banks, who are perfectly willing to accept deposits from System D entrepreneurs, but unwilling to lend to them. Neuwirth’s anger is rightly placed, and his solution – that communities and governments need to demand that banks serve the communities they are located in, not just their shareholders – is timely and correct, even if difficult to implement.

The solutions Neuwirth offers for strengthening and legitimating System D are, by his own admission, modest in scope. Merchants should work together to regulate their activities, settling disputes within mediation mechanisms. They should take responsibility for the physical spaces they inhabit and work to make them clean and safe. They should consider systems that review product safety and ensure the quality of goods sold. Neuwirth isn’t opposed to regulatory involvement in this space – he looks closely at the “pure water” industry in Nigeria, where entrepreneurs drill wells, pump water and purify it under government standards before selling it in single-use sachets to thirsty customers. The system could be a health nightmare if minimum health standards are not enforced. The Lagos government can’t provide clean drinking water to its citizens, so it has found a way to work with System D to ensure that people have water and the water doesn’t kill them – for System D advocates, there’s potential in that story and a model other governments might follow.

But the pure water story also reveals the apparent limits of System D. “Pure water” usually won’t kill you, but it’s an environmental nightmare, as millions of nylon bags clog the Lagos sewers. It’s a wonderful thing that Lagosians can drink safe water, but a system where thousands of school-age girls sell sachets of water because you can’t drink the water out of the pipes isn’t a system any sane planner would advocate for. System D can get Lagos’s citizens to work, but it’s never going to build affordable and environmentally sound public transportation. If merchants follow Neuwirth’s advice, they may collectively buy bigger diesel generators, but they’re unlikely to fix Nigeria’s laughably inadequate power grid.

The people Neuwirth celebrates are – rightly – frustrated by their governments. They avoid paying taxes both because those taxes can be arbitrary and unaffordable, and because they see very few government services in exchange bought with those revenues. But governments need revenues to build infrastructures. And, as economist Paul Collier argues, they need taxes – and need to put those taxes to use in productive ways – in order to have legitimacy. System D seems like a local maximum in an equation – when it works well, it’s amazing what entrepreneurial people can accomplish against impossible odds. But the solutions created are convoluted and incomplete, and it’s reasonable to worry that System D may prevent more formal systems from providing more complete solutions to societal problems.

I don’t actually disagree with Neuwirth on this point – I wrote an essay some years back about incremental infrastructure, an idea I’d had from studying African mobile phone markets, that suggested that systems like power grids and roadways might be built by the cooperation of entrepreneurs when governments failed. My proposal suffers from the same weaknesses I’m criticizing Neuwirth for: it’s hard to see how a collective of merchants builds a railroad, and sometimes a railroad is what’s really needed for economic development.

But that’s an awfully big problem to demand that Neuwirth tackle – if you want to understand precisely how complicated that problem is, try this thought piece from Collier, proposing a possible solution to railroad construction in sub-Saharan Africa. Neuwirth’s job isn’t to solve the problems of System D. What he does – compellingly, readably, engagingly, and frequently, brilliantly – is give the reader a picture of how the world’s economies actually work, and a convincing argument that we need to respect and understand these economic systems. It’s a good read and an important book.

When you pick up Neuwirth’s new book, also consider grabbing a copy of Gordon Mathews’s “Ghetto at the Center of the World”, a remarkable ethnography of a single building in Hong Kong, Chungking Mansions. Chungking Mansions is a nondescript and somewhat run-down tower block in one of the more crowded corners of Kowloon. Inside is a remarkable market, where Chinese, Pakistani and sub-Saharan African merchants interact with one another in a microcosm of global trade. Mathews refers to this economic phenomenon as “low-end globalization”, and his book unpacks the history, mechanics, personalities and motivations in a way that is absolutely fascinating.

Chungking Mansions exists because of a peculiarity of Hong Kong’s visa policies. Tourist visas to Hong Kong are easily obtained by citizens of many nations – residents of countries like Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya often have difficulty obtaining visas to Europe, the US or China, but are able to travel to Hong Kong for anywhere between 7 and 90 days, depending on the discretion of the immigration officer. As China became a major manufacturing power, Chungking Mansions became a critical interface between Chinese factories and developing world markets. The upper floors of the building feature low-cost guesthouses that cater primarily to traveling merchants, and restaurants that offer home cooking for the African and South Asian migrants who work out of the building.

On the ground floor, dozens of stalls feature Pakistani merchants selling Chinese-made mobile phones to African middlemen. Mathews documents the trade in intimate detail, explaining the ownership of the individual stalls (they are generally rented from Chinese owners who are rarely present in the building, but have a powerful owner’s association that governs the working on the market), the provenance of the phones sold (including the difference between original phones, 14-day phones – original phones returned to the vendor by dissatisfied customers, good fakes and bad fakes) and the economics of importing phones into sub-Saharan Africa. Mathews posits (without much data to back this claim) that up to half the mobile phones in Africa come through Chungking Market and enter African markets through the luggage of entrepreneurs.

I found Mathews’s account so compelling that Chungking Mansions was my first stop when visiting Hong Kong a few weeks ago. Based on his explanation of Chinese perceptions of the building (as a dangerous place filled with drug addicts and criminals), I expected a much shadier place than I actually found. Chungking Mansions is immediately familiar to anyone who’s bought electronics in the developing world – it’s cleaner and better organized than markets I’ve been to in Nairobi and New Delhi, but in some ways, functionally the same place. Walking through the stalls, I experienced a tesseract, a folding of space that let me move between Hong Kong, Pakistan and West Africa over the course of a few meters. I dropped into one of the few non-phone stores, a clothing store featuring street fashions, including a wide array of Yankee caps. I gave the merchant grief about not stocking Red Sox hats, quickly figured out that he was Ghanaian, greeted him in Twi, and was warmly embraced and invited upstairs for fufu and groundnut soup. It wasn’t at all hard to figure out why Mathews had fallen in love with the place – if you’re interested in how globalization is transforming economies, Chungking Mansions really is one of the centers of the world.

I had the chance to meet Mathews when we lectured together at the University of Hong Kong a few days later. He’s as wonderfully crazy as you’d imagine him to be, and told me that he’d written the book in a bar across the street from his research site. “The key is that the bar has roasted peanuts in the shell. I’d shell a peanut and think, then write a sentence, then sip my beer. That writing pace is just perfect as long as you remain under three beers.” Rarely have I learned so much from a single ethnographer – how to smuggle phones into Ghana in my luggage, the best strategies for overstaying my Hong Kong tourist visa, how to befriend Nepali heroin addicts, and how to pace my writing.

I’ve been pushing Mathews’s book on the ethnographers I know because it’s an amazing example of the power of the deep dive. It’s possible that no one on the planet understands Chungking Mansions as thoroughly as Mathews does based on his decade of research. But his insights are profoundly helpful not just for understanding this one wonderful and strange building, but for understanding globalization as it is actually practiced. Where Neuwirth takes a broad view, considering economies on four different continents, Mathews rarely leaves the confines of a single building and still manages to tell a story that’s global in scope and impact.

Somedays it seems that everyone has joined Twitter. And then a new account comes along and raises interesting questions about what the service is for and how it should be used.

Welcome to Twitter, Harakat Al-Shabaab Al Mujahideen Press Office, now tweeting at @HSMPress.

Al-Shabaab is the militant organization waging war against the Transitional Federal Government (TFG, for short) of Somalia. They’re an offshoot of a more moderate Islamist organization, the Union of Islamic Courts, which was ousted by the Ethiopian military, backed by US support and intelligence. In the wake of their ouster, extremists associated with the movement reformed as Al-Shabaab (“the youth”) and have been fighting over control of Mogadishu and southern Somalia. In designating Al-Shabaab a terrorist organization in 2008, the US state department asserted ties between Al Shabaab and Al Qaeda – a backgrounder from the Council on Foreign Relations questions the strength of those ties, but points out ideological similarities between the organizations.

Recently, Operation Linda Nchi (Swahili for “Protect the country”), which involves the cooperation of TFG, Kenyan, Ethiopian and French troops, has been attacking Al-Shabaab positions within southern Somalia. The mission is a response to the kidnapping of Kenyan civilians and aid workers from the Dabaab refugee camp in Kenya, allegedly by Al-Shabaab. The mission has raised concerns about possible human rights violations, and some Kenyans have raised questions about whether their country should be engaged in a possibly lengthy war with their neighbor. Others have pointed out that attacks against civilians in Nairobi are likely to be linked to Al-Shabaab, pointing to the importance of ousting the militants.

Operation Linda Nchi has had a presence on Twitter since October 27th, when Kenyan military spokesman Major Emmanuel Chirchir began his Twitter feed.

Good to be here to give you the right and official information

October 27, 2011 7:24 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@MajorEChirchir

Major E. Chirchir

The major has been an avid correspondent, answering questions and inquiries. He’s also used Twitter in some very unusual ways, attempting to alert civilians in Somalia that their towns will be under attack:

#OperationLindaNchi BAIDOA, BAADHEERE,BAYDHABO,DINSUR, AFGOOYE,BWALE, BARAWE,JILIB,KISMAYO and AFMADHOW will be under attack continously

November 1, 2011 11:38 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@MajorEChirchir

Major E. Chirchir

#OperationLindaNchi The Kenya Defence Forces urges anyone with relatives and friends in the 10 towns to advise them accordingly.

November 1, 2011 11:39 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@MajorEChirchir

Major E. Chirchir

Whether this “please tell a friend” strategy will actually save lives is unclear. It’s fascinating (to me, at least) to see the electronic version of leaflets warning of incoming bombs…

So perhaps it’s not surprising to see Al Shabaab responding with a Twitter presence of their own. Major Chirchir’s feed features regular updates on military actions:

#OperationLindaNchi 3rd Dec; Attack at Hayo, 11 TFG soldiers died, 54 injured 25 flown to Garissa and Nairobi, 40 Al Shabaab’s killed

December 6, 2011 1:52 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@MajorEChirchir

Major E. Chirchir

And so does Al Shabaab’s:

6-DEC: Mujahidin forces attack #Amisom base in Dharkenley District, #Mogadishu. 3-hour battle resulted in some #Amisom casualties+base burnt

December 7, 2011 12:47 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@HSMPress

HSM Press

But it’s hard to imagine seeing some of Al Shabaab’s tweets on an official military feed:

7 Uganda-trained TFG soldiers surrender themselves to Mujahidin in #Mogadishu. They are welcomed after proclaiming repentance from apostasy

December 7, 2011 12:56 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@HSMPress

HSM Press

That Al-Shabaab is using social media isn’t entirely surprising. They’ve developed a reputation for issuing well-written English language press releases, and had maintained a website, chat rooms and other web presences. (Many have been removed – it’s not clear to me whether they were removed by the decision of ISPs hosting them, or whether those companies came under government pressure.)

And Al-Shabaab has shown a willingness to use multiple media platforms to spread their message. Omar Hammammi, aka Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, an American muslim who joined Al Shabaab in 2006, has an extensive collection of videos on YouTube, and has recently been releasing rap recordings, including “Send Me A Cruise“, a plea for martyrdom by cruise missile.

Needless to say, not everyone is thrilled that an extremist organization is using Twitter to disseminate its news:

Will al-Qaeda be allowed to use #Twitter? No. Then why is @HSMPress – Somali terrorists – going unchecked? Freedom stops with violence.

December 7, 2011 2:33 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Ed_Husain

Ed Husain

And it’s not hard to imagine that Twitter may end up fielding some questions from the US government, which has declared Al-Shabaab a terrorist organization, and might conceivably argue that providing Al Shabaab with a platform to express themselves could constitute “material support” to a terror organization. (It helps that Twitter is free for Al Shabaab to use, and that Twitter doesn’t review new users of the service.) There’s always an argument to be made that the account in question is not, in fact, Al Shabaab… there are several Al Qaeda accounts that appear to be fakes (including a very funny one retired on 9/11/11). Heck, there’s even a parody Major Chirchir account.

I’ve made the argument that corporations who make possible the digital public sphere need to support people’s right to speak freely, even when that speech is unpopular. (That’s the subject of the talk I gave at the Chicago Humanities Festival a few weeks ago.) That means ensuring that Wael Abbas can post about Egyptian police brutality on YouTube… and I believe it means making it possible for Al-Shabaab to share their views via Twitter, even while I condemn those views.

Anyone know whether there are other extremist, terrorist or militant organizations using Twitter in this way? How has Twitter reacted thus far? And if – as I suspect – Twitter is making their platform open to all types of speech, including inflamatory speech, do you agree with my argument that this is ultimately a good thing?

Today is International Volunteer Day, a celebration of the millions of people around the world who give their time, energy and wisdom to projects and causes they care about. Volunteers feed the hungry, care for the sick, comfort the grieving. We live in a world where companies and governments are responsible for producing most of the products and services we need and use. Volunteers prove that there’s another way to build things – we can write encyclopedias or operating systems, we can report the news, or host a revolution.

Choosing to build a volunteer community was the key decision that made Global Voices possible. Rebecca and I realized that some of the most interesting information we were getting from the developing world wasn’t coming from professional reporters, but from volunteers, using their blogs to share their perspectives on local and national events with the wider world. Our first action as a community - the manifesto that continues to inform and govern our decisions today – was co-written by volunteers at our first meeting, and rapidly translated into twenty five languages by volunteers.

While there’s a small team of editors and coordinators for whom Global Voices is a job (as well as a passion – we don’t pay well enough for anyone to do this for the money!), the lifeblood of our project is our volunteer community. 532 active volunteers are responsible for Global Voices today, part of the 1,904 volunteers who’ve worked on writing, editing, translating, designing over the seven year life of our endeavour. Volunteers have written more than 58,000 articles on Global Voices, and translated even more. We rely on an even broader community of volunteers – the tens of thousands of bloggers, twitterers and videographers who we feature on our site, the vast majority of whom create not for fiscal gain, but out of passion and dedication – to make our work possible. And we’re governed by volunteers: our board of directors serve without pay, giving their time because they care about our work and the sustainability of our community.

As co-founders of Global Voices, Rebecca and I are profoundly grateful to everyone who gives their time and energy to make the world more just, fair, knowledgeable and connected. But we wanted to call attention to two volunteers who’ve taken incredible risks to work with us. Late last week, Razan Ghazzawi was arrested by Syrian authorities when she travelled to Amman, Jordan to attend a workshop on press freedom. Razan is an active blogger and twitter user, and has written for Global Voices and Global Voices Advocacy. She’s one of several brave Syrians who is willing to work under her own name, despite the dangers of arrest, and we hope for her speedy release from detention.

We also recognize Ali Abdulemam, a Bahraini blogger, activist and Global Voices volunteer. Ali remains in hiding today, because he’s been sentenced to fifteen years in prison by Bahrain’s courts, who accused him of plotting a coup. In fact, Ali was sentenced because he’s been a passionate advocate for online speech in Bahrain, and has been arrested and tortured for his work on Bahrain Online and Global Voices.

We are profoundly grateful for everyone who volunteers their time and energy to make Global Voices a reality. We pledge to work with you to make possible a world where no one ever need risk arrest to participate in a remarkable community like ours.

-Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon, Global Voices co-founders and volunteers