It’s been an interesting few days for people who study social media. As the protests over election results have continued in Iran, and Iranian authorities have prevented most mainstream journalists from reporting on events, there’s been a great deal of focus on social media tools, which have become very important for sharing events on the ground in Iran with audiences around the world. I, like many of my friends at the Berkman Center and Global Voices, have spent much of the past two days on the phone with reporters, fielding questions about:

- Whether social media is enabling, causing or otherwise driving the protests in Iran
- How Iranian users are managing to access the internet despite widespread filtering
- The ethics (and practice) of distributed denial of service attacks as a form of information warfare
- Whether such online activities are unprecedented

Rather than tell you what I and colleagues have been saying to reporters, I’ll point you to one of the better stories, by Anne-Marie Corley in MIT’s Technology Review - she interviews several of my Berkman and Open Net Initiative colleagues and outlines the argument many of us are making:

- Social media is probably more important as a tool to share the protests with the rest of the world than it is as an organizing tool on the ground.
- Iranians have been accessing social networking sites and blogging platforms despite years of filtering - there’s a cadre of folks who understand how to get around these blocks and are probably teaching others.
- Because so many Iranians use social media tools - often to talk about topics other than politics - they’re a “latent community” that can come to life and have political influence when events on the ground dictate.

Gaurav Mishra rounds up dozens of blog and MSM articles and offers an excellent overview of arguments around these questions (with a strong dose of his own interpretation, much of which I share.) He references Evgeny Morozov, who’s got a thorough denunciation of DDOS as a strategy for protest, correctly pointing out that it mostly functions to make participants feel better about themselves by giving them a way to feel involved with the protests. Unfortunately, unlike positive online gestures of solidarity (retweeting reports from Iran, turning Twitter or Facebook pictures green), this one does little more than piss off sysadmins, helps Iranian authorities make the case that forces outside Iran are “attacking the country” and encourage user-driven censorship as a response to unwanted speech.

So, given the wealth of commentary on the questions above by folks smarter than me, let me weigh in on some of the questions I haven’t heard asked.

Biases and social media - One of the reasons MSM outlets are so focused on social media is that they’re not able to deploy reporters to cover these protests. In some cases, the majority of reporting from the ground is coming from social media. It’s worth asking what the biases might be in amplifying those social media reports. Ahmedinejad’s supporters tend to be poorer, more rural, less educated and more likely to speak Farsi than Mousavi’s supporters - a picture of the protests via social media runs the danger of overstating Mousavi support or minimizing Ahmedinejad support. We’ve been trying to counterbalance this a bit at Global Voices - Hamid Tehrani, our Iran editor, did a brief roundup last night of bloggers supporting Ahmedinejad. It’s worth noting that the posts he quotes are all in Farsi: language may well be a barrier that is influencing coverage as well, if voices for reform are easily quoted in English and voices for the status quo are in Farsi.

My friend and colleague David Sasaki reminded GV editors that bloggers had predicted a Rafsanjani victory in 2005, and suffered their “Howard Dean” moment when it became clear that their candidate had little support outside the most liberal bloggers. That’s a very different situation than what’s happening now - the hundreds of thousands of peple in the streets points to profound support for Mousavi - but reminds us that the online voices from Iran, especially the English-speaking ones, probably aren’t representative of mainstream opinion.

An Iran story, not a social media story - Iran is one of the countries American and British media pay closest attention to. The use of social media for protest - especially to promote a protest to international audiences - is far from unique. But because there’s such strong media focus on Iran, and such interest in the use of social media for protest, this is a perfect storm for interest in this topic.

I’ve been asking some of the reporters I’ve spoken with where they were on other recent social media and protest stories. Citizen media has emerged as one of the key spaces for journalism in Fiji in the wake of a coup government that’s censoring mainstream media. It’s been a key source of information in Madagascar as that country’s suffered through a violent change of government. (One reporter who I mentioned this to remarked that Madagascar was “just a speck of an island somewhere”. That speck is twice the size of Great Britain and has the population of Australia…) In Guatemala, online media publicized the assasination of a lawyer by forces close to the president… and government authorities began arresting people for twittering the story to amplify it. These weren’t huge stories for most newspapers - the Iran story is huge not because of the social media aspect, but because protests in Iran are a huge story independent of citizen media.

Flock - I’ve written at some length about homophily, the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together. Turns out that reporters flock, too. It’s somewhat amazing to me the extent to which reporters from really good newspapers are all asking the same questions. I’m glad that people are taking a close look at the phenomenon of social media in the Iranian protests - it’s an important, fascinating and worthwhile topic. But there’s a lot of topics out there, and I wonder whether we benefit from a thousand well-researched stories on this phenomenon rather than a hundred, and nine hundred other stories.

My friend and colleague Hal Roberts is one of the internet’s top censorship and filtering researchers. When Chinese authorities announced that a client-based piece of filtering software called GreenDam would be required for installation on new PCs, Hal downloaded the software and spent a good chunk of this week trying to understand how it works. He and colleagues released a report earlier today that demonstrates that GreenDam is incredibly ambitious and invasive to user privacy, but also badly broken and virtually unusable.

Perhaps the best demonstration of this fact is the video Hal put together earlier today and posted on his blog. It shows GreenDam slowly realizing that it wants to block a Falun Gong site… then blocking any other sites that begin with the letter “f”, due to the way Internet Explorer handles autocompletion and GreenDam blocks content.

Basically, GreenDam approaches censorship very differently from conventional filtering tools. Most client-side filters rely on lists of banned sites downloaded from the internet. Not GreenDam - Hal’s test shows that it doesn’t appear to know that falundafa.org (a site that the Great Firewall always blocks) is a banned site until he comes across a sensitive phrase, three clicks into the site. That phrase is checked against an internal dictionary. This allows GreenDam not only to censor the net, but to shut down an application like Notepad if someone writes sensitive content. Similarly GreenDam apparently doesn’t keep watchlists of porn sites - instead, it attempts to detect if an image is pornographic by checking against an internal algorithm. (Some testers have discovered that the algorithm blocks light-skinned naked people, though not dark-skinned ones.)

My guess is that problems like the ones Hal documents in his report and video are going to prevent GreenDam from being mandated across China. And I have confidence that Chinese hackers will find effective ways to shut off the tool shortly after it’s released widely. But it’s hard to know… and the ambitions of the tool designers to censor the ability to even type certain phrases is pretty chilling.

The opening panel discussion at BeyondBroadcast is titled “Local Perspectives” and it invites citizen media innovators from around the world to show off their work. Unfortunately for the schedule, the panel includes six terrific speakers, roughly twice as many as could fit in the allotted time.

Myoungjoon Kim of MediaAct in Korea, a community media center, tries to explain the unique features of the Korean media climate. Korea has a level of bandwidth that makes the US look pretty pathetic. Actvist media emerged at the same time as Korea reformed along neoliberal lines. Media was deregulated, and there was a recognition that community media couldn’t just include traditional broadcast media, but needed media education, community radio, and community centers that allowed people to create media. The work his organization does offers more than 200 courses to more tha 5000 members who work to create media in a South Korean context. He tells us that for his work to succeed, he’ll need broad alliances, need for reforms in policy structure and increased infrastructure to teach media.

Lova Rakotomalala, Global Voices correspondent for Madagascar, talks about the relationship between citizen media and the political crisis in his come country. 2009 has been extremely trying for Malagasy - the two cyclones that have left thousands homeless have barely made the news. Instead, the little international attention that focuses on Madagascar has focused on a political crisis - public protests which have led to a military takeover. Not only has there been little reporting on the crisis - media companies have been providing divisive propoganda, not helpful reporting.

This situation has led Malagasy to fear democracy - less than 24% of the popular now express enthusiasm for democratic government. There’s widespread resentment towards the international community for perceived meddling in Malagasy affairs. And it’s clear that Madagascar needs a comprehensive agricultural policy.

Lova was one of the founders of FOKO Madagascar - founded in the wake of TED Africa in Arusha by Harinjaka, a prominent Malagasy blogger, the goal of the project was to help Madagascar become more digitally literate and present, and to send the message that Madagascar is “open for business”. Lova quotes Mike Tyson - “Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.” As the crisis spread in Madagascar, Foko began documenting protests in the street, trying to fill the gap in international reporting.

Citizen media in Madagascar includes not just the FOKO bloggers on the ground, but a network of 55 bloggers living in five countries. They use blogs, Flickr, twitter and SMS to communicate, and their perspectives are aggregated on Rising Voices and Global Voices. By working with Ushahidi and Frontline SMS, the project is able to involve a much broader group than just the 160,000 internet users in Madagascar - it reaches 2.2 million mobile phone users. This work has led to international attention, including stories on CNN and in the Wall Street Journal. This is great, but there’s still only news coming from Antananarivo in mainstream media, while Foko reports from five different cities.

While the internet reaches very few Malagasy, it’s critical for the diaspora, and for the public perception of Madagascar. The current government wants international recognition and has proven willing to intimidate journalists and bloggers - there’s a desperate need for a structure to protect these reporters. But we’re also seeing evidence that social media helps organize social movements, like the movement to free Razily, which ultimately succeeded in releasing the young man who led Madagascar’s “Tiananmen moment.”

Juana Ponce De Leon of the New York Community Media Alliance talks about finding ways to amplify voices that must be heard. Her organization represents 350 weekly and bimonthly populations, representing 90 communities and 50 languages. The organization began as a set of programs for the New York independent press association, but took on special importance in the wake of 9/11, helping bring voices and stories from the Muslim world into the press during a tense and stressful time.

NYCMA doesn’t focus on original reporting - their work is primarily about translation. “It’s a forum for people who make this media” to bring coverage of communities to a wider audience. While the website doesn’t get overwhelming traffic - about 20,000 visits a week - it’s read heavily by NY city and state government agencies.

Ponce De Leon explains that the economic slump has hit her members hard. Little businesses that support community media are having financial problems, and they’re sometimes unable to support local media. There’s a shift from print to internet, but it’s much slower than in mainstream media. Roughly 39% of the organizations she works with have strong, interactive websites. Some are moving directly to internet radio, which is likely to serve as a hub to facilitate connections for diaspora communities.

In the near future, the main focus is on the 2010 census. New York has at least 150 languages represented in the school system - it’s extremely worrisome that the census is being conducted only in seven languages.

Daudi Were, legendary Kenyan blogger, starts his talk with a story about Kenyan prisons. Every ten years or so, Kenya’s prisons explode in violence. Each time, the minister of home affairs is dispatched to the prison to write a study on what’s going on. Daudi tells us that, decades ago, a prisoner tried to hand the minister a letter - he turned away, not acknowledging it, and the prisoner was later beaten. Fast forward to today, Daudi tells us, when some of the ministers had been in prison in the 1980s. They can ignore what’s going on in the prisons, but video ends up being released and news gets out - newsrooms get mobile phone footage of wardens beating prisoners to death.

Digital tools, he tells us, are bringing people into conversations even when people are reluctant to address the issues at hand. Democracy is government by discussion, and Daudi tells us, it’s based around the idea that the other person has something to say that’s worth listening to. Decisionmaking by discussion is very African - if you marry a woman, you may end up spending a long day negotiating her dowry. You could probably complete the debate in ten minutes, but the discussion takes forever because you’re avoiding conflict. That’s what decisionmaking structures like Indabas are about - we have discussions until we can work through most conflicts.

Blogs today create a new space for discussion. “Blogging is probably the most African thing you can do online today. I’m pretty confident that if my grandmother had the internet, she would have been a blogger.”

It’s not content that’s king, Daudi tells us - it’s content and community. This is one of the strenghts of Global Voices, he argues - bloggers discover that there’s a community that has their back. This is also a strongly African idea - “Ubuntu means ‘You are, therefore I am’”. Identity and existence is a function of community.

The rise of new media in Africa is exciting, but it can be very scary. It’s fun to watch the Kenyan government put exam results online and have servers taken down from the load of proud grandparents in Canada logging online to read them. But when Kibaki declared himself the winner of the 2007 elections and began naming ministers, Daudi tells us, the new ministers’ farms were burning before Kibaki finished reading the statement. Violence can spread as well as opinion, information and news. The lesson, Daudi tells us, is that people want to be relevant and want to be heard - if we can’t find ways to let them speak, they’ll burn things instead.

Antonio Cruz introduces himself as being from the country of the country of Manny Pacquiao. If you don’t know who that is, you’re not a boxing fan, but you’ve got something in common with most of the folks in the USC audience. The Phillippines are an enormous country, the 15th most populous, and it’s a country that’s has a huge diaspora and a population scattered over thousands of islands. It should come as no surprise that the country has embraced the mobile phone, with 70 of 90 million residents owning phones.

TXTPower, the organizatio that Cruz helped to found, helps organize citizens and consumers via mobile phones. Huge demonstrations helped topple the previous government and bring President Gloria Arroyo to power… and a clever ringtone campaign almost toppled her. And major consumer movements are organizing against mobile phone tarrifs and taxes.

TXTPower’s methods are pretty funny. To protest a special SMS tax - which would affect the 2 billion SMS sent in the country per day - TXTPower circulated the Speaker of the House’s personal mobile phone number. The thousands of messages received caught attention from the most important local newspaper. In the wake of a fiscal scandal about vote rigging, an audio clip of the President (allegedly) asking a colleague whether an election had been correctly fixed became a hit political ringtone, and TXTPower’s server was taken down by the interest.

TXTPower turns eight years old this August, and “we’re confident of winning more battles.” One of the co-founders (Mong Palatino, the Southeast Asia editor for Global Voices) was just elected to parliament. And new campaigns focus on the costs of mobile phone service, on training people to learn how to get more out of their phones, and on a political campaign to ensure that Arroyo doesn’t turn into “an eternal leade” - actions on are being coordinated on Twitter, Plurk, Facebook and other social media.

I’ve written in the past about my friend and colleague John Kelly’s excellent work visualising connections in different blogospheres. His best known research is on the Persian-language blogosphere, where his analysis of linking behavior showed clusters around liberal and conservative politics, but also around poetry. Subsequent analyses have seen clustering around different factors. Russian blogs appear to cluster around platforms - Livejournal users link primarily to other Livejournal users, and so the Russian “blogosphere” is a mess of disconnected communities. The Arabic blogosphere clusters based on location, rather than on interest - Egyptians tend to link to Egyptians, Saudis to Saudis.

The Chinese internet, Kelly tells us, has a complex and hybrid form. It has aspects of clustering via platform, but there are also “trading zones”, where people group by interest and mix content across platforms. He’s looking at techniques of “attentive clustering”, joining people together based on sites they’re paying attention to, rather than on direct links to one another. The research is in an early state, but it looks like Kelly’s techniques will be able to release some interesting information.

Roger Dingledine of Tor offers some insights into his unique and exciting platform for censorship circumvention and anonymity. He reminds us that it’s free software - you’re encouraged to build your own Tor network, though you might have a hard time replicating the 1500 active relays and 200,000 users he’s got on his network. Tor has the most users in China, followed by the US and Germany.

Tor is now a “real live 501c3″ non-profit organization, and it’s been funded by an amazing variety of organizations: the US Department of Defense, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Voice of America, Human Rights Watch and Google. Speaking to all these funders requires using different language. “When I talk to Walmart, I talk about communications security. Talking to my family, I mention privacy tools. To the military, it’s ‘traffic-analysis resistant communications networks’. It’s the same tool, but I phrase it in terms of the characteristics people care about.”

All these users, Roger reminds us, are needed to keep the network robust and anonymous. Good cryptography isn’t sufficient to provide anonymity - you need to disguise who’s talking to whom, which means Tor benefits from being a network used by privacy freaks, online gambling fans and human rights activists. “Nobody tries to break crypto anymore - they just do social network analysis, find the hub, then break into your house.” Tor helps with one aspect of this problem - it disguises a great deal of communication between people who could otherwise be linked via traffic analysis. On the other hand, Roger remembers a training he and I gave a few years back, where our clients explained were being surveiled both electronically and in the physical world, with parabolic microphones intercepting conversations. Online security can only take you so far.

Roger notes that groups like Tor can help control the pace of the censorship and circumvention arms race. The more publicity tools get, the more likely they are to get blocked - Roger’s very interested in building a tool that’s useful for Chinese internet users, but not aiming at overthrowing or somehow overcoming the Chinese government, because that’s almost guaranteed to make the tool a target for blocking and censorship.

Zhang Lei, the founder of Chinese translation community Yeeyan, starts his talk with a story about his last name. While Zhang is the world’s most popular last name, it’s generally considered exotic in the US, and most Americans can’t pronounce it correctly (”Jong”, not “Zang” or “Zeng”.) He sees this as an illustration of the difficulties people have in understanding one another when separated by barriers of language.

While 18-20% of world’s internet users are Chinese, it’s unlikely that Chinese is as well represented linguistically on the net. Zhang points out that there’s really no accurate data on what languages are represented online - he references an old and probably bad cite on Wikipedia that suggests that 80% of web content is in English, followed by German and Japanese. If this is true, there’s a massive imbalance between users and the content available to them. A simple experiment confirms this suspicion. A search for “breast cancer” on Google reveals 38 million pages - a search for the Chinese equivalent yields only 6 million, and the quality of content is much lower.

Machine translation isn’t a satisfactory solution. A simple paragraph of text, translated from English into Chinese via cutting edge technology, yield about one third readable text, two thirds gibberish. There’s a ton of content that would be worth translating from English to Chinese, and we’re not going to be able to do it automatically.

Zhang’s project, Yeeyan.com, wants to be “wikipedia for translation”. His community involves 8,000 volunteer translators, who’ve created 40,000 translations. The community includes 80,000 participants, who are able to comment on or improve translations. Perhaps the most exciting new project is a collaboration with The Guardian, to translate the newspaper into Chinese on a regular basis, producing an official, sanctioned edition - this is an interesting contrast to ECOTeam, which translates The Economist via an informal understanding with the publisher.

The motivation for Zheng’s project is to build understanding across gaps of language. He explains that terms can mean something very different, even in translation: “The term ‘conservative’ in relation to economic policy means ‘anti-freemarket, pro-government control’ - the opposite of what it means in the US.” These misunderstandings get in the way of dialog and understanding. In 2008, we saw major understanding gaps built on language gaps, centered on Tibet and Chinese nationalism. “I can’t solve these problems, but I can translate,” Zheng tells us. “Translation is the first step and a must to bridge the divide.”

Isaac Mao has been blogging since 2002, and he’d be the first to tell you that blogging has changed how he sees the world. His work now is on developing a theory called “shareism”, based on the idea that humans are inclined to share with one another, but that cultural barriers have emerged to restrict sharing, and that losses and absences in our society arise, in part, from our failure to share. Isaac sees the hierarchical system of Chinese society, and several thousands of years of history of top-down control, as providing an especially challenging environment for shareism.

Chinese people, he believes, are being separated into two groups - those who are connected and those who are disconnected. Bloggers spend a lot of time sharing, subscribing to other bloggers, and connecting with one another. They have more authentic relationships to one another, he believes, based on their willingness to share and connect. The unconnected are influenced primarily by mainstream media - the connected can influence each other, can access information that’s hidden from the unconnected and circumvent censorship. Ideally, they’ll connect via social media, access important information, and share information with the unconnected people, empowering them. “This could be the hope and the future of the Chinese community.”

It’s not reasonable to posit the elimination of China’s hierarchical systems - it needs to be replaced with something, and Isaac believes the sorts of connection he’s talking about could offer that necessary structure. He sees this change already happening in small ways - communities that have access to alternative media stop being as dependent on highly controlled mainstream media. As attention switches to these new spaces, business and political leaders need to pay attention to these new spaces, as do foreign journalists. He notes that journalists covering China are now paying close attention to bloggers, not just to established media sources.

Liao Hang Teng of the Oxford Internet Institute is interested in ways that Chinese internet authorities are mediating between chaos and control. He introduces us to two terms - zhi and luan 亂. Zhi means “order, governance, control or cure”, while luan means “disorder, instability and chaos”. People in China talk about history in terms of periods of zhi or luan, Liao tells us, whether periods of time were chaotic or ordered.

Beijing has been replacing the luan of the internet with the zhi of control, he tells us. A 2007 study suggests that 80% of Chinese users prefer control of the internet, and prefer that the government do it. There’s a sense that “too much freedom leads to luan”, like the 1989 Tiananmen protests, or like Taiwan’s government.

Liao suggests we stop thinking about the Great Firewall and think instead about Great Dams and Great Canals. What we’re seeing is “zoning technology versus dynamic order” - a decision to open free speech zones, much as “free-speech zones” are becoming unfortunately common at US protests. “Freedom is being introduced as a special exception permitted by Beijing.”

An example of a controlled speech zone is Baidu Baike, a participatory encyclopedia introduced as an alternative to the Chinese-language Wikipedia. William Chang, technology officer of Baidu, suggested that it makes sense that Chinese users wouldn’t want to use “a service based out there” - “It’s very natural for China to make its own projects.”

While Baidu Baike has grown sharply, it hasn’t caught up with Chinese Wikipedia. Liao sees it as a failed experiment, because it hasn’t managed to embrace the diversity of the Chinese wikipedia. He uses outlinks from the sites and the language sets represented as a proxy for linguistic diversity, and sees much less diversity in the Baidu project. He also notes that Baidu got the “grass mud horse” incident wrong, reporting on it as an animal, while the Chinese Wikipedia understood that it was a complex parody and statement about free speech.

Referring back to the 2007 survey that showed enthusiasm for government control, Liao wonders if there’s a missing option - perhaps control of the internet should be in the hands of the internet community or of civil society.

My friend and colleague Rebecca MacKinnon reports on her recent paper published in First Monday on blog censorship. She notes that in talking about censorship in China, we need to consider both censorship of sites outside the firewall (i.e., the blocking of Human Rights Watch inside China) as well as censorship inside the firewall, the censorship of content on domestic commercial websites, the takedown of domestically hosted websites and the shutdown of data centers.

Rebecca has studied the mechanisms used to censor on sites within China, and notes some early work she did with Human Rights Watch, which suggests that corporate censorship wasn’t uniform, wich meant that companies were making choices, acting in reaction to government demands, but offering their own interpretations. Nart Villeneuve at Citizen Lab followed up on this work, and was able to discover different levels of filtering between Baidu, which censored a great deal, and Yahoo, MSN and Google which censored less (they’re listed in order of decreasing censorship.)

Because the Great Firewall is so effective at blocking access to blogging platforms, most Chinese users publish on domestic platforms. Her recent research demonstrates that there’s incredible variation in what can and cannot be published on these platforms. Using excerpts from Chinese blogs and Xinhua news reports, she tested 108 potentially sensitive texts on 15 different platforms. Filtering differed wildly - one platform filtered 60 of 108 texts, while one filtered only one, and there’s a wide spread of results in between those extremes.

She outlines five ways content is blocked from publication:
- The platform simply refuses certain sensitive posts
- Posts are held for moderation, and never appear
- Posts are visible to the authors, but never to the public
- Posts are published, but removed within 24 hours
- Posted, but sensitive words are replaced with asterisks - Blogbus, for instance, blocks out all mentions of Hu Jintao, even in Xinhua articles.

One filtering method was only used by Microsoft’s Windows Live service - sensitive articles could be published and would be seen in Hong Kong or the US, but MSN geofiltered to ensure posts couldn’t be read from within China.

Rebecca tells us that very sensitive texts, like a provocative Bao Tong essay, were either not censored at all, or censored by very few platforms. She believes that the censorship method tends to overfocus on certain words, while very controversial texts might get through if written in “official language”.

Why is there such variation in platforms? We’ve only got theories, she tells us - it might have to do with relationships between certain editors and government officials. It’s going to require more study… and it’s important to do this study because this form of filtering is deeply important to Chinese users and may represent a pattern of censorship we’re likely to see in the rest of the world, not just in China.

Dave Lyons has been studying “the Golden Shield project“, which he argues may be one of the world’s great misunderstood efforts. Essays by American commentators on the project - an effort to bring computers and databases to the Chinese police force - portray it as “Police State 2.0” (Naomi Klein) or as “too creepy to bear repeating”, as James Fallows writes. Lyons thinks these authors are badly misunderstanding what’s being implemented and what it means for China.

The focus of the Golden Shield project is on bringing computers to the police, from the lowest provincial levels, up to the Ministry of Public Security, and developing eight databases: population management, criminal records, fugitives, driver’s licenses, stolen vehicles, stolen property, national security, and border control. Some of those sound pretty sinister, while others are the sorts of databases we expect police to have. Lyons has focused on the “population management” database - described as “the dragon’s head of Golden Shield” - which tracks hukou registration (a registration of your city of residence) and the “second generation” national ID card, which features an RFID chip. Most of the country has moved to this new card, which stores a great deal of personal data.

Lyons points out that forgery is a serious problem in China. It’s possible to buy fake cards quite easily - indeed, in Mission Impossible 3, a single frame of the film features a piece of graffiti advertising the services of a ban jun, a forger, with a phone number. This was sufficiently provocative that the film was never screened in China… but it circulated widely via pirate DVDs. As a result, the ban jun advertised on the wall needed to change his phone number - he got so many calls that it got in the way of his business, weeding out the merely curious from potential customers. More ambitious forgers have been known to advertise by scrawling their numbers on police cars. So while the idea of a database that tracks all Chinese people is very scary, the reality may be a lot less so. “The biggest project of the golden shield has to do with accurately identifying citizens”, which can lead towards service delivery and accurate statistics, much like the census in the US.

Another part of the Golden Shield is a video surveillance system, using CCTV. He shows us a picture of a surveillance center in Shenyang, which looks pretty intimidating. He points out that the name for this project is sometimes translated as “Skynet”, which hearkens back to the evil computer in the Terminator movies. But a second surveillance room is a photo of Chicago’s “Operation Virtual Shield”. Lyons wonders whether what we’re seeing is China catching up with how the rest of the world does law enforcement, not breaking new ground. He notes that the most frightening tech in facial recognition isn’t used in China - it’s used in Las Vegas casinos to weed out hustlers and card sharks.

Finally, Lyons suggests that we misunderstand if we connect the Golden Shield to internet censorship - while there are at least a dozen organizations involved with internet censorship, Skynet is focused much more closely to the ground.

Lyons’s talk receives a great deal of commentary from the audience, including Chinese scholars sharing their experience of how casually regulations are enforced. One talks about visiting a Chinese cybercafe without a registration card - the cybercafe administrator simply swiped her in with his own card.

Sarah Cook of Freedom House wonders if Lyons is being fair in comparing surveillance in Chicago to that in Beijing, given that residents in Chicago have legal protections they can rely on which are denied to Chinese citizens - Lyons concedes her point. But there’s another message here - simply understanding security practices based on what systems are in place is insufficient - you’ve got to look at how those systems are embedded in societies and how they’re actually carried out.

(I’m at the 7th China Internet Research Conference at the Annenberg School of Communications. Information on participating is here.)

The second session at the China Internet Research conference is a roundtable on the Global Network Initiative, an association of academic institutions, corporations and nonprofit institutions working on a set of best practices for corporations to follow in engaging with governments on online freedom of expression issues. Hosted by my colleague Rebecca MacKinnon, the round table includes Colin Maclay from the Berkman Center, Leslie Harris from the Center for Democracy and Technology, Bob Boorstin representing Google, internet entrepreneur Isaac Mao, and Ang Pen Hwa from Nanyang Technical University.

Rebecca explains that the GNI is a result, in part, of hearings in US Congress about actions by US corporations in China, emerging in part in reaction to Yahoo’s role in the arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao. Corporations wanted advice on best practices working in nations that don’t respect rights of free speech, and NGOs wanted to ensure that companies worked to protect human rights. This created a sense of common interest, which has allowed the companies to meet on common ground and discuss strategies.

Boorstin acknowledges that being the representative of a large US corporation at a Chinese internet conference can be “like being the fire hydrant at a dog show”. He explains that Google has much less leverage in China than most people think - if Google threatened to leave, he says, “The Chinese government would say, ‘Bye bye’”. Their market share is small compared to Baidu’s - 22% versus 70% market share - and Boorstin argues that they’ve got less influence than larger Chinese companies would have.

Without disagreeing with him, Isaac Mao points out that his open letter to Google (published over two years ago, and never responded to by Google…) was directed because Google has such a strong reputation for being socially progressive - he hoped Google would choose to do the right thing and engage in China in a way that explicitly promoted freedom of expression.

Ang suggests that GNI not try to get the US first ammendment adopted around the world. Instead, it’s important to celebrate a best practice - immunizing a provider from third-party liability. In other words, individuals are responsible for their speech, not companies. Without this limitation on liability, it’s virtually impossible to run book reviews on Amazon or maintain a site like Trip Advisor. It’s not unreasonable, he argues, to expect regulation of offline media to creep into regulation of online media, but this single principle makes a great deal of free expression possible. Colin Maclay questions whether we want to regulate the internet like media, or like free expression, pointing out that online expression is very different from traditional media: it’s cheap, unlicensed, and yet still persistent, having an impact even after a takedown order.

Leslie Harris responds to criticism that the GNI doesn’t include small companies or non-US companies - it’s based primarily around Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. “When we started, we wondered whether we could get these three companies to sit in a room together… and the answer was initially ‘no’.” In other words, it’s required a great deal of work to get as far as the initiative has gone so far - we may need to be patient in expecting the group to extend any time soon.

Rebecca calls on Michael Anti, reminding us that his blog, hosted on Microsoft’s MSN Spaces (now Windows Live) was censored in 2005, not by China but by the company. He offers the observation that Chinese users are offering “a quiet acceptance of some compromise - without some compromise, we know we’ll lose these key services.” But he suggests that these companies formalize a bargain with their Chinese users: “We want companies to udnerstand that when they do business in China, it’s exchange - we exchange part of our freedom to support you. You should have some special group to help civil society as an exchange for us ignoring your compromise with the government.”

Harris fields a question about whether the US Congress has a seat at the table of GNI. “They’re at the table, but not as a welcome guest,” she quips. While Congress isn’t represented at the table, pressure from congressional committees helped bring participants to the table, and it might require EU pressure for European companies to participate as well.

In response to a question about whether GNI serves as a “fig leaf” for corporations, Boorstin points out that Google added a notice at the bottom of their Chinese search results making clear that filtering is taking place - other engines have caught up and provided a similar notice. “What’s under the figleaf: pretty much the three Ts, and one F - there’s more than that, but I think most Chinese users know what material they can’t get.” (That would be Tibet, Taiwan, Tienenman and Falun Gong, for those not following the Chinese internet closely…)

Isaac Mao and Ang Pen Hwa field a question about setting up an initiative like the GFI in Asia, with Asian stakeholders. Isaac believes GNI could be localized to Asia, because there’s a “cultural history of controlling culture” which leads to attempts to control the internet too closely. This, in turn, means that Asian companies are facing the sorts of pressures that brought US governments to the GFI table. Ang tells us he’s hoping to set up a “committee of internet experts” - “it’ll be like the EFF, but you can’t use the word ‘Freedom’ in Singapore without being misunderstood.” Support for the initiative is more likely to come from small businesses and academia in Singapore, he believes, not from civil society.

I’m at the 2009 Chinese Internet Research Conference at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. My colleague Hal Roberts and I are presenting some of our research on circumvention tools this afternoon, and I’m enjoying the chance to catch up on research in a field I don’t know a ton about - the Chinese internet. The conference is organized in part by my good friend Lokman Tsui, who apparently hasn’t slept in weeks.

Michael Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School, oints out that study of the Chinese internet reminds us that “the internet means very different things in very different settings.” Studying the Internet in China means moving back and forth between understanding the medium itself and understanding the cultures and economic and political settings in which it is placed. The conference, which focuses on the Chinese internet and civil society, includes talks on the public sphere and deliberation, censorship, surveillance, civil society, women and minorities, panics, nationalism and grassroot cultures. Delli Carpini warns us, “Let’s not pretend we understand the internet in the US on these issues” - we’re still figuring out how these online spaces work everywhere in the world.

Min Jiang of UNC Charlotte used to work for CCTV in Beijing, so she’s well positioned to study Chinese media, propoganda and citizen participation. In a talk titled, “Spaces of Authoritarian Deliberation”, she explains that we need to moderate our understanding of the Chinese internet. It’s not a controlled space punctuated by bursts of protest, as usually portrayed in the Western media. Nor is it the emerging deliberative public sphere as Chinese authorities like to claim - it’s somewhere in between.

The online space in China is huge, with 298 million internet users. 2/3rds of these users are under 30, and lots of them are bloggers. (She uses the figure of 162 million, which seems very high to me, but would be interesting to see the number sourced.) 700 million Chinese have mobile phones, and 117 have phones with internet access. This, she suggests, creates an unprecedenced ability for users to engage in collective action.

There’s an impression, she suggests, that “if we bring down the great firewall, China will be free” - in truth, it’s a lot more compicated. China’s not as simple as a repressive dictatorship - it’s a complex authoritarian state, evolving over time, especially in online spaces. She offers the example of a comment by Jackie Chan in a public forum: “We Chinese need to be controlled.” Chan was offered the opportunity to respond, saying “I was quoted out of context.” Chinese netizens didn’t buy it - some suggested that perhaps Chan should be sent to North Korea to see what it’s like to be controlled. “Modern authoritianism is deliberative - it listens and responds to the people.”

She looks closely at four kinds of spaces:

Central propoganda spaces, where the government controls the message. Despite the control of these spaces, there’s a surprising amount of open discussion, including complaints posted about local government and discussions of issues like the global financial crisis.

Government-controlled commercial spaces are even more lively - while the spaces are centered on topics like music, news and messaging, there’s a great deal of discussion on political topics. When these spaces get too frisky, they can get shut down until they tone down - some spaces, after being shut down, reopen overseas. They’re emerging as increasingly important spaces to discuss public issues.

A small number of new spaces are emerging as civic forums. They’re sometimes explicitly focused on defending rights. As a result, these sites are generally asked to register their presence with the government. But other civic spaces are emerging, sometimes on sites like a Facebook clone - these are platforms for self-organizing.

Finally, she considers international deliberative spaces, a category that ranges from international media sites like China Radio International and CCTV online, which try to shape the image of China online, to spaces built by overseas bloggers and translators, like the ECOTeam (which translates The Economist into Chinese), or groups that translate entertainment content like Desperate Housewives.

The open questions Min Jiang is interested in focus on how we can engage emergent civil society in China, engage with reformist bureacrats, and engage the digital generation.

Yuan Le presents a paper that she and Boxu Yang at Peking University developed from studying two Chinese bulletin board communities - Qiangguo Forum and
Maoyan Kanfren Forum. The former is a long-established forum, online since 1999, and seen as an officially sanctioned space. The latter is more associated with the right. Yuan and Yang develop a sophisticated political model that divides Chinese political culture into “old left”, “new left”, “nationalist” and “neoconfucian”. They’re interested in studying what debates emerge between these groups - some are ideological questions, while others are debates over the language used, particularly between old Marxist language and more modern language of the social sciences.

Analyzing 398 threads and 1243 replies, handcoding posts for political opinion, the researchers discovered a clear left/right break between the two studied forums. They also saw evidence of very different agendas between the spaces - on Qiangguo, conversations often centered on issues of social welfare, while discussions of liberal democracy and individual freedom dominated on Maoyan Kanfren.

Sarah Cook of Freedom House presents their recent report, Freedom on the Net. It’s an attempt to rank fifteen countries in terms of internet freedom, using 19 indicators in three thematic areas: obstacles to access, limits on content and violation of user rights.

China comes up as “not free” under the Freedom House methodology, grouped with Cuba, Tunisia and Iran. She posits a paradox - China is aggresively embracing the internet, and is one of six countries they considered where internet penetration has recently doubled, but there’s sophisticated and multi-layered apparatus of control.

Cook points out that there are several phenomena which are unique to China, including strong pre-publication controls (which Rebecca MacKinnon has studied at length). Other controls, like paid manipulators of public opinion, like the 50 cent party, are seen in other venues like Russia and Tunisia.

Freedom House uses a similar points-based methodology to score press freedom, and Cook compares press and online freedom. While there’s not a large difference in highly-controled countries, there is a big gap in partially free countries - there’s more freedom online, though Cook worries that gap is closing.

(I’m not especially thrilled with Freedom House’s decision to try to rank internet freedom on a single hundred-point scale. Comparing Tunisia and China, which have utterly different filtering methodologies and social implications, feels like comparing apples and oranges to me. And trying to correlate two indexes which both measure factors that are very hard to quantify strikes me as potentially very misleading. Then again, I’ve worked closely with colleages at the OpenNet Initiative, and feel like the Freedom House work doesn’t add much to the work they’ve done over the past several years.)

SI USTED ESTA LEYENDO ESTE MENSAGE ES QUE YO RODRIGO ROSENBERG MARZANO FUI ASESINADO por el Secretario Privado de La Presidencia GUSTAVO ALEJOS Y SU SOCIO GREGORIO VALDEZ, CON LA APROBACION DEL SEÑOR ALVARO COLOM Y DE SANDRA DE COLOM.

That’s the beginning of a three-page letter written and signed by lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg on May 9th. “If you are reading this message, it’s because I, Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, was assasinated by the private secretary to the President, Gustavo Alejos, and his associate Gregorio Valdez, with the approval of President Alvaro Colom and of (the President’s wife) Sandra De Colom.” (A translation of the full statement is available here.)

The following day, Rosenberg was shot while bicycing in Guatemala City. In the letter - and the accompanying video, above - Rosenberg tells his audience that, if he is killed, it’s because he represented a prominent Lebanese businessman, Khalil Musa, and his daugher Marjorie Musa. The elder Musa had been involved with complex dealings with state-controlled bank, Banrural - he’d been offered a board seat and then later had it withdrawn, and believed his involvement with the bank was being used to assuage concerns that the bank was engaged in corrupt practices, including laundering drug money. Earlier this month, the elder and younger Musa were killed - while the police report that the Musas were killed by workers in one of their factories, Rosenberg believed that they were killed because they threatened to expose government corruption. The Guatemalan government strenuously denies Rosenberg’s posthumous charges.

The release of Rosenberg’s written statement and video have led to street protests as well as a great deal of online organizing. Xeni Jardin - who’s covered this story very closely on BoingBoing - reports that these protests have been streamed live on the internet via Ustream.tv, with the broadcast periodically interrupted by police harrasment. Guatemalans and others following the situation are organizing groups on Facebook and tagging their posts on Twitter with the #escandalogt tag.

In one of her posts, Xeni notes that the young people organizing online to protest Rosenberg’s murder are taking a great deal of personal risk. That was a prescient warning on her part - today, Guatemalan police arrested Jean Ramses Anleu Fernández, who was twittering under the handle @jeanfer.

The tweet that got Anleu into trouble read as follows: “Primera accion real ’sacar el pisto de Banrural’ quebrar al banco de los corruptos. #escandalogt” - which (very roughly) translates as “The first thing to do is to withdraw money from Banrural to break the naks of the corrupt”. While many of Anleu’s tweets may have annoyed the government, authorities argue that this one constituted inciting a financial panic. (Xeni’s translation of the previous link, a story in Prensa Libre, is here.)

Now #freejeanfer and #jeanfer are joining #escandalogt as popular tags in the Guatemalan twittersphere. Needless to say, I’m setting up scripts to track all these tags and will release data here as it comes in. I’m intrigued to see whether we see pro-Colom voices in the tagstream as well as those protesting against the government, as we did with the #pman tag in Moldova.

Anleu’s arrest is a reminder of the very real dangers associated with online protest in repressive nations. Marc Lynch offered his concerns about Egyptian activists protesting on Facebook in a recent talk in New York - he worried that the ease of organizing online protests would motivate people to confront the Mubarak government without understanding the possible consequences. If the Colom government is willing to kill whistleblowers - which they strenuously deny - and arrest people for twittering in protest, it’s reasonable to assume that online activist carries some real risks in Guatelama. But Guatemalans aren’t running away from the medium - in the past couple of hours, dozens of people have reposted the tweet that led to Anleu’s arrest as a sign of solidarity and as a challenge to authorities.

Xeni’s all over this story on BoingBoing. Wikipedia’s got a good overview of Rosenberg’s death and the surrounding circumstances. Prensa Libre in Guatemala City is covering these interrelated stories very closely, for Spanish speakers. We’re late to the story on Global Voices, but I hope we’ll be covering it soon.

I ran a little tool I developed a few weeks back to check the frequency with which phrases and hashtags appear on Twitter. #escandalogt isn’t hugely frequent, registering at 0.052% - compared to #swineflu, for instance, which was running at over 2% at the height of hype/hysteria. What’s interesting is that #escandalogt is about as frequent as several of the tags listed on Twitter’s “Trending Topics”, getting more use than #fixreplies, #GoogleFail and #theoffice, all currently featured on the right sidebar. It’ll be interesting to see whether #escandalogt emerges there… or whether this is a sign that those topics aren’t entirely algorithmically generated and some human curation is involved.

Monday night, Rachel and I went to our local movie theatre to watch “Slingshot Hip-Hop“, a documentary on Palestinian hiphop by Palestinian/Syrian/American filmmaker Jackie Reem Salloum. It’s the sort of film where 83 minutes of cinema can lead towards several hours of intense (and perhaps heated) conversation. The film’s stars are a set of Palestinian hiphop crews, including DAM (Da’ Arabian MCs) who are based in Lod, a suburb of Tel Aviv, and PR (The Palestinian Rapperz) who are based in Gaza. The film traces the lifecycle of each crew, the inspirations behind their music, their struggles to be heard and accepted, and their quest to play a show together.

Trailer for “Slingshot Hip-hop” by Jackie Reem Salloum

This aspiration - a DAM/PR joint concert - provides the dramatic structure for the film. It’s extremely difficult for “‘48 Palestinians” - Palestinians living within Israel - and “‘67 Palestinians” - Palestinians living within the West Bank or Gaza - to travel and visit one another. The struggles the two crews go through are a powerful illustration of the circumscribed lifestyle Gazans in particular are living, confined to a small, crowded, tightly controlled territory, and the difficulties of creating a coherent national identity in a “Palestine” that’s split between two disconnected territories and a diaspora.

“Born Here” by DAM

Rachel offers a helpful review of the film, as well as reflections on what is and isn’t covered in the narrative presented. As someone deeply committed to Israeli/Palestinian dialog, she’s a little disappointed that the film didn’t look at spaces - like Hip Hop Sulha - where the Israeli and Palestinian rap communities have been able to come together, connecting on stage.

As someone obsessed with the idea of “connection”, what I found most interesting about the film was the ways in which the kids in these two marginal neighborhoods found ways to connect with each other and with broader hiphop culture. An early scene shows DAM in the bedroom of one of the members in Lod. A set of exterior shots makes it clear that Lod can feel more like a developing nation than a suburb of Israel’s glossiest city. But the DAM boys have an excellent CD collection, featuring the hits of political hiphop, from Public Enemy to Talib Kweli, by way of Tupac. Their early rhymes, showed in enthusiastic but embarrasing footage, are highly derivative gansta rap… ten years later, they’re sharp political statements, which one member of the crew describes as 30% Public Enemy, 30% Palestinian authors like Edward Said and 40% the streets of Lod. The DAM boys are tightly connected to parallel communities - Palestinian intellectuals, and American political hiphop - even though they’re physically distant from many of the conversations.

(A side note: It’s interesting to rethink some of the rhetoric of late 1980s hiphop in regards to these Palestinian rappers. Public Enemy’s lyrics made it clear that Chuck D saw America as a war zone with black Americans targeted by the white majority. I heard those lyrics as poetic, not literal, part of the same atmosphere produced by the air raid sirens that punctuated live PE shows - songs like “Don’t Believe the Hype” seemed to caution against taking PE’s lyrics too literally. But the same phrases in the mouths of Palestinian rappers, especially those in Gaza, have a very different resonance. Parts of New York City may have felt like a war zone when PE was spitting tracks, but the same lyrics sound very different in a literal war zone.)

The internet is a major reason why these connections are possible. In discussing DAM’s first hit, the filmmaker doesn’t talk about record sales, but about “over a million downloads”. In interviews in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, all the kids talk about discovering Arabic rap online and downloading as much as they could. Every shot of a rapper’s bedroom features a computer, usually a beat-up tower lying on its side, case off, innards cooled by a room fan. The computers are where rappers make or find beats, record tracks, and send their music out to the masses.

Despite my obsession with digital connection, it took my breath away when the filmmakers made it possible for PR and DAM to connect for the first time… via mobile phone. Salloum and her crew filmed PR’s first public show at the Red Crescent Society in Gaza, and brought the footage to show Palestinian rappers in Israel. We see the members of DAM call the PR crew on their mobile phones and congratulate them on a great first show. Abeer, a Palestinian rapper and R&B singer, gives one of the PR guys her IM handle, and we watch him blush beet red on the other end of the phone in Gaza.

I’ve written a bit about the ways in which the Internet can create a virtual nation that maps only partially onto a physical nation. When Kenya exploded in violent protest after the 2007 elections, a virtual Kenya, including Kenyans in South Africa, the UK and America, as well as those in the physical nation, sprang into action, building efforts to counter the violence.

From Birmingham, Alabama David Kobie decided to disable the increasingly tense Mashada forum and put up I Have No Tribe in its place, urging Kenyans to confirm that their national identity was more important that tribal tensions. Kenyans used services like Mama Mike’s to send phone minutes, petrol and food aid home - and bloggers like Juliana Rotich rode shotgun on the resulting aid convoys, documenting the distribution of food aid to those who needed it. Shuttling between the US and Kenya, Binyavanga Wainaina penned “No Country for Old Hatreds“, a plea in the New York Times to understand the Kenyan conflict as a political, not ethnic one. And a team of Kenyans in Eldoret, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Alabama and Florida came together to build Ushahidi, a platform to document Kenyan violence, which has gone on to be a popular platform for distributed reporting now in use around the world.

Digital Kenya is bigger than physical Kenya - it includes expatriate Kenyans and people who love the nation, even if they’re not Kenyan. So I wasn’t surprised by the existence of a digital Palestine… but I was blown away by the realization that digital Palestine exists in part because it’s impossible to exist in physical Palestine. The guys from DAM dismiss the idea of travelling to Gaza to give a concert as being roughly as fanciful as planning a concert on Venus - the difficulty PR has in leading Gaza to travel to the West Bank appears to confirm their skepticism. This virtual, digital Palestine beats no common ground at all, as far as the rappers are concerned - it lets them follow each other’s work and cheer each other’s successes - but the longing on both sides to connect in person feels almost Shakesperian. My guess is that Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t have been content IM’ing each other, and the separation between DAM and PR becomes yet another factor fueling the anger and passion that infuses much of the men’s work.

I wish there were some way to make “Slingshot Hip-Hop” required watching for aspiring MCs around the world. There’s a lot of guys out there who’ve got a lot of style but not much to say. You may find what DAM, PR and the others have to say uncomfortable or inspiring, but you can’t say that they’re talking a lot and saying nothing.

I wrote an earlier post on this film as it was still in production, before the storyline about DAM and PR emerged. It generated a very productive comment thread, including some pointers to collaborations between Israeli and Palestinian youth around hiphop.

This has not been an easy year for Madagascar. A power struggle between the president, Marc Ravalomanana and Antananarivo mayor Andry Rajeolina led to the army ousting the president, who resigned on March 17th. Rajeolina has been leading the High Transitional Authority, which has become increasingly autocratic and hostile towards free speech.

It’s hard to characterize the opinion of my Malagasy friends towards the civil strife. I think some were frustrated with Ravaolmanana’s government, which faced accusations of corruption and mismanagement, and hopeful that matters might improve under Rajeolina. But everyone I’ve spoken to has been deeply saddened by the violence that’s accompanied the protests, and increasingly upset about the detention of journalists, the closure of radio and television stations and the harrassment of bloggers. And I think everyone is hoping that the country can find a way to come back together and return to normalcy.

That may help explain why Razily has emerged as a hero for many Malagasy bloggers. On March 28, Razily carried the Malagasy flag into a street that had been closed by the Malagasy army. While the streets were filled with protesters, they remained behind the military cordon - Razily crossed into the space controlled by soldiers carrying the flag and marched solemly down the street. He was promptly seized by soliders in a pickup truck, and carried away from scene along with a companion, who had approached the truck to make sure Razily was unharmed.

Razily has not been released from military custody, and news recently emerged that he would be tried by the military for the crime of “flag theft”. Friends in the Malagasy diaspora are organizing a campaign to petition the transitional government not for his release, but for transparency regarding the charges against him and the trial he faces. The petition also expresses concern at the restrictions on speech and the use of tear gas and live rounds against protesters. The petition invites people to sign by adding a comment, and recognizes that many supporters in Madagascar may be unable to sign with their real names due to very real concerns about their safety.

My friend Lova Rakotomalala explains why Razily is so important to many Malagasy people:

Razily embodied the hope of the silent majority that is neither pro-Rajoelina, nor pro-Ravalomanana, that believe that there is still room for understanding and compromise if we reach out to each other and think of the nation first ( hence the flag). The fact that he marched on undeterred by the bullets around him made a strong impression on many of us. Bloggers have the protection of being behind the computer screen, Razily did not.

One of the reasons the crisis in Madagascar persists is that it’s receiving very little attention from the media, even on the African continent. In the absence of sustained pressure and scrutiny, there’s not much pressure on Rajeolina and Ravalomanana to find a solution that allows Madagascar to go forward. I’m often skeptical of the value of online petitions, but I think that demonstrating that people around the world are paying attention to the situation in Madagascar, and to the rights of a peaceful demonstrator, could have an important impact in this case. I hope you’ll join me in signing the petition and in spreading the word about Razily.

Global Voices has been covering the situation in Madagascar closely.

Wikipedia’s article on the 2009 protests is a good introduction to the situation as well.

Two Facebook groups exist to support Razily:
Save Razily and Libérez Razily et les autres.

A note on the video embedded above: There are at least two videos circulating of Razily’s march with the flag. The one above, from YouTube, has no sound. The one on DailyMotion has the sounds of the people recording the video. I interpret their laughter as a sign of their amazement at the audacity of Razily in walking towards the military with the flag. The fact that they cheer as he resumes his march after pausing suggests to me that they’re supportive of what he’s doing, not laughing at him, as does the fact that they posted the video. But I suspect the laughter could be confusing, and could seem very inappopriate given Razily’s arrest and subsequent disappearance. That’s why I’ve embedded the silent version, but am linking to the version with sound.