In the fight for democracy, social media is far from irrelevant

In November of 2009 I was invited to attend an event called the World Blogging Forum in Bucharest, Romania organized by Romanian foreign language students with support from the Romanian government. I was one of only two North American bloggers (the other was from the U.S.) with bloggers from all around the world gathering to discuss blogging and social media in their countries.

It was a fascinating perspective as the conference proceeded and the discussions occurred, both in the formal hall and in the corridors. There was a very different perspective and views on social media from the bloggers in the democratic/more developed countries, such as Western Europe, and those countries still struggling for democracy and without media freedom, such as the Caucasus, the Middle East and China.

In the democratic world, it was about telling our personal stories, commenting on issues important to us, advocating for causes and, in many cases, sharing ideas on how to monetize on our blogs.

In the countries where they don’t have the democratic freedom we take for granted, where they don’t have the free press we enjoy, where they live daily under oppressive and dictatorial governments, their perspective on social media was very different. For them, social media is a vital tool of empowerment and democracy promotion.

For countries without a free press, blogs are their free press, with actual citizen journalists reporting on events the government wants censored, and that wouldn’t be reported otherwise. And Twitter is their rapid response and organizational tool. Small handheld cameras and video sharing tools like YouTube add another layer, bringing video that would never be shown on state television.

On the first day of the conference, after the Romanian president made an opening address, the first session was on blogging and citizen journalism. I was the last of three presenters on the topic, giving a survey of the Canadian political blogging scene, and how parties, citizens, journalists and politicians are using social media tools.

But I felt incredibly out of place following two speakers from the other side of the equation. Zhou Shuguang is a widely-known Chinese blogger and techie who has been a thorn in the side of the Chinese government, and has spent much of his time burrowing holes in the Great Firewall of China the government has erected to try to censor the Internet. His is a truly impressive story.

But as I read about the amazing events in Tunisia and Egypt, and as I watch the gripping live coverage from Egypt on Al Jazerra English, the speaker I keep thinking back to is Egypt’s Wael Abbas. Before Abbas’ presentation, like many in the West I didn’t know much about Egypt, but I though it was a fairly friendly, free country, particularly compared to many of its neighbours.

His perspective (here's his blog), and his story, was eye-opening. And he also provided examples of how social media then was already playing an important role in the fight for democracy in Egypt, and played a key role in a tug of war between activists and the government that has continued to today, and has now boiled over.

Here’s my report on his presentation. In light of current events, it’s quite prescient:

I had read about the Chinese Great Firewall and its attempts at censoring the Web, often aided and abetted by Western companies looking to stay on the good side of the Chinese government to get access to the lucrative market, but I’m sad to admit the situation in Egypt described by the next speaker, Wael Abbas, was completely new and shocking to me. Abbas is a blogger and human rights activist who was named Middle East person of the year by CNN in 2007.

In Egypt, said Abbas, there’s no protection for journalism, there’s censorship on supposed security grounds, copies of papers are often confiscated and presses delayed or closed, tapes confiscated from videographers, TV stations raided by security officials and tapes seized, all leading to an environment of self-censorship by the media to avoid confrontation with the government.

As a result, he said there was a dire need in Egypt for an alternative form of media to support civil society and provide real, uncensored news to the Egyptian people. The government had been blocking the Web but ended that practice when it wanted to encourage telecom investment. Instead, said Abbas, the government doesn’t censor blogs, but instead harasses, detains and arrests bloggers within the country instead in an attempt to intimidate then into ceasing their activities.

Blogging and citizen journalism first came into its own in Egypt when the mainstream media weren’t covering protests against President Mubarak, election rigging and police violence. Bloggers stepped in to fill that gap and while sometimes the barrier between blogging and activism blurred, the objective approach bloggers tried to take found public support. They presented video and pictures of what was happening and asked people to draw their own conclusions. The media were actually spurred-on by the bloggers, being encouraged to report more of what was actually happening, and publishing blogger content. Opposition parties also reached out to the new media.

Abbas himself drew negative government attention when he published photos of hired thugs that arrested female protestors, and exposed paid pro-Mubarak protesters, and posted controversial video. He has had his Facebook, YouTube and Yahoo accounts shut down under government pressure for his activities, and the government has accused him of being a criminal, a homosexual and having converted to Christianity in attempts to discredit him.

While at its peak around 2005, Abbas said bloggers helped push the envelope for press freedom and political freedom by the opposition, its still under attack and the government’s counter-attacks are working, causing him to lose optimism that real change will happen in Egypt.

It’s hard to see change without international support and that’s hard to get for the situation in Egypt, said Abbas, because there’s not much awareness of the situation internationally. Mubarak is viewed as a moderate friend of the West but people don’t know that Egypt has fake press freedom, fake opposition parties and fake elections, it’s all a mirage.

Despite the Egyptian government's attempts to cut off the Internet in the country to deny this vital tool to the protesters, Abbas is still blogging and posting video on his blog of the protests, arrests and beatings. It's amazing, important, compelling work.

I hope he stays safe.

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Youth and Asia: Liveblogging the final afternoon panels at Canada at 150

1:04 PM: We’re back for the afternoon session on this final day of the Liberal Party’s Canada at 150 conference in Montreal. Well, kind of back. The Hyatt’s WiFi has now become officially useless, so I don’t know when this will get online. Seriously, the Via Rail WiFi is better than the Hyatt’s. They’re clearly not ready for Canada and the digital world.

The afternoon keynoter is up though to set the scene for the final panel of the day, which is ending the day’s look on foreign policy with a look at Asia, and then young Canadians making a difference in the world without government backing.

And then Michael Ignatieff will give, according to the media that I’ve read, what will be the most important speech of his life and one that, if he doesn’t hit the ball out of the park, will lead to his immediate ritual suicide. And then he’ll have a press conference. So look forward to that.

Apparently Ignatieff had a conference call with the caucus over lunch, so I’m sure whatever he says will leak any minute anyways…

1:09 PM: OK, back to the hall though. The speaker is Dominic Barton, worldwide managing director of McKinsey & Co., and he’s speaking of Asia’s role in the World of 2017 and, I guess, what it will mean for Canada.

He’s talking now about the massive urbanization that’s underway in China, showing before and after pictures of cities like Shenzen. The difference in just a few years from sleepy historic-looking city to booming modern metropolis is astounding.

Some interesting statistics. Some 900 million consumers will enter the middle class in Asia by 2017, representing a massive new market. There’s also a massive shift from rural areas to cities, which carries many repercussions. What do they want? Education is one, and there’s opportunity both to grow institutions there as well as attract foreign students.

1:14 PM: It’s not just China, he adds. India, Indonesia, many countries are growing, need infrastructure, and are looking for partners.

1:18 PM: A Japanese mentor once told him Asia was a Western invention, the countries of the region don’t have that much in common with each other. Barton says he’d argue that’s changing, though, because of trade. Inter-Asian trade is expanding dramatically. Some 20 universities in China are now dedicated to teaching Mandarin speakers Arabic to facilitate trade.

1:21 PM: Where are these Asian companies going to build their North American headquarters? Barton says it could be Canada, but they’re not going to if we’re not out there actively engaging with them.

Interesting, he says the Europeans, and particularly the Spanish, are much more engaged in Asia than we are.

1:29 PM: There will soon be over 5 million annual Asian tourists, and we need to build an infrastructure to support and engage that opportunity.

Overall, Barton says there is a fantastic opportunity in Asia and we need to be more proactive than we have been or it’s going to pass us by.

1:31 PM: A few questions now, Barton is saying he’s like to see more eastern and Asian history taught at the primary level, and greater faculty exchanges at the post-secondary level. Also, our universities opening satellite campuses in the region, and vice versa.

Last question is from Penny Collenette, former Liberal candidate in Ottawa-Centre, and now at the University of Ottawa. I was afraid for awhile we’d have to go an entire Liberal-sponsored policy conference without mentioning water policy, but Penny saved us that fate.

1:40 PM: And now it’s the final panel before the MOST IMPORTANT SPEECH EVER by Ignatieff. It’s on Canadians making a difference in the world, particularly young , Canadians. Panellists are Yasmine Charara of Observatoire jeunesse Oxfam-Québec, Ryan Hreljac of Ryan’s Well Foundation, and Parker Mitchell of Engineers without Borders. It’s chaired by Dr. James Orbinski, a former president of Doctors Without Borders.

1:24 PM: Hreljac makes everyone wonder what the hell we were doing at 18.

1:44 PM: Mitchell says his group didn’t start out to be influential, it started out to make life better on the ground. RIM didn’t start to change communications, it started to make a really cool technology. His advice is let’s stop thinking about influence, let’s start doing things, having bold ideas, setting bold targets and going after them.

2:04 PM: Mitchell suggests a student loan interest/payment holiday while young people are volunteering with NGOs or overseas. Wouldn’t cost too much. I like that idea.

2:07 PM: Slight correction to my notes on this panel. Parker Mitchell isn’t here. Filling in for him is George Rota, also a co-founder of Engineers without Borders. So anything that was attributed to Michell, attribute it to Rota. My bad.

2:28 PM: I think this panel is up. It's been interesting, but I'm re-setting for Ignatieff's closing address. Buzz on press row is possibility of actual policy to be contained therein. We'll see. Catch you on the flipidy-flop.

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Briefly, on torture redactions and on Chinese rebukes

I'm in the busy period of the holiday season so time for blogging has been limited of late. I would though like to make two brief comments on recent events.

First, the Heavily Redacted Torture Documents that the Conservative government has been releasing in an attempt to make it seem like they're not hiding anything while still hiding plenty. Their excuse, national security, seems rather dubious to many observers.

Let's take a big leap of faith for a moment here, and suspend rational thought, and posit that both sides are acting in good faith without political motive: that the opposition want to get to the bottom of serious accusations, that the government has legitimate national security concerns around full disclosure, and that neither is motivated solely by political aims (embarrass the government, or hide the government's culpability.)

There is a way around this. During the Paul Martin government he had each of the opposition party leaders sworn in as members of the privy council. This gave them high security clearance so that, in theory, they could be briefed on confidential and secret matters of national security.

So, IF the government isn't just hiding to hide misdeeds, and if the opposition isn't just out to score points, WHY doesn't the government call in the opposition leaders and brief them. Show them the full, uncensored documents. If the documents show no cause for concern, then we move on. If the documents do raise serious issues, then they continue to call for a full public inquiry.

Of course, such a solution would require all sides to put politics aside and behave like adults. So let's not hold our breath.

Second, China's Premier Says Bad Things About Stephen Harper. Frankly, I largely agree with Wen Jiabao on the substance of his criticism of Harper's China policy. Nevertheless, the episode leaves me feeling sympathetic towards Harper, not China.

As the saying goes, "no one can hit my brother but me." So when the leader of a country like China takes a shot at our PM I'm going to be pissed, even if that PM is Harper. It's an instinctive defensive, nationalistic reaction.

Besides, to offer the criticism behind closed doors is one thing. To do it in public was a total dick move by China.

As for the opposition, including my Liberals (hi Bob!), you'd be wise to constrain your comments to legitimate criticisms of Harper's China policy. Saddling up beside a Chinese government with a history of human rights abuses, of oppressing its people, censoring the press and the Web, and so on, just to buttress your political attacks ... that's just another dick move, frankly.

To coin a phrase, We can do better...

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Day 1 in Bucharest for #wbf2009, Blogs and Citizen Journalism

(Note: This entry was written Tuesday night; WiFi not cooperating at the hotel again)

With the opening political and celebrity remarks out of the way at the first World Blogging Forum in Bucharest, Romania, the first panel of the day was up and the topic was Blogs and Citizen Journalism, and the influence of blogs on the civil society.

An interesting topic, and I found out last night (after a few glasses of Romanian wine) that I’d been tasked to give a speech as part of this panel. So I made some notes last night and this morning, and as I listened to the first two speakers my notes began to look less and less relevant and interesting.

Zhou Shuguang

The first speaker was Zhou Shuguang from China. A self-taught IT guy and former network administrator, Zhou is a veteran blogger who has had many run-ins with the Chinese government for reporting on news the government doesn’t want covered and helping people get around the “Great Firewall of China” the government has built to keep non-government approved foreign news from getting into the country. Zhou was even arrested at one point by the government for his work.

He noted that China has 40,000 police that monitor the Internet full-time, it has over 500,000 sites blocked in the country, last year some 80 people were jailed things they’d written on the Web, and in early June this year, on the anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre, Web access evaporated all together.

To get around government censorship, some in China use a VPN or a proxy to connect to outside networks, but that’s not an option that’s available to most Chinese people. Twitter and Friendster are both blocked, but Zhou said people are using RSS subscriptions and RSS feed tools such as Google Reader to get around the blocks. He also described a network he hopes to build that will help more people get access to free and open news and information, and to communicate with each other free of censorship.

Wael Abbas

I had read about the Chinese Great Firewall and its attempts at censoring the Web, often aided and abetted by Western companies looking to stay on the good side of the Chinese government to get access to the lucrative market, but I’m sad to admit the situation in Egypt described by the next speaker, Wael Abbas, was completely new and shocking to me. Abbas is a blogger and human rights activist who was named Middle East person of the year by CNN in 2007.

In Egypt, said Abbas, there’s no protection for journalism, there’s censorship on supposed security grounds, copies of papers are often confiscated and presses delayed or closed, tapes confiscated from videographers, TV stations raided by security officials and tapes seized, all leading to an environment of self-censorship by the media to avoid confrontation with the government.

As a result, he said there was a dire need in Egypt for an alternative form of media to support civil society and provide real, uncensored news to the Egyptian people. The government had been blocking the Web but ended that practice when it wanted to encourage telecom investment. Instead, said Abbas, the government doesn’t censor blogs, but instead harasses, detains and arrests bloggers within the country instead in an attempt to intimidate then into ceasing their activities.

Blogging and citizen journalism first came into its own in Egypt when the mainstream media weren’t covering protests against President Mubarak, election rigging and police violence. Bloggers stepped in to fill that gap and while sometimes the barrier between blogging and activism blurred, the objective approach bloggers tried to take found public support. They presented video and pictures of what was happening and asked people to draw their own conclusions. The media were actually spurred-on by the bloggers, being encouraged to report more of what was actually happening, and publishing blogger content. Opposition parties also reached out to the new media.

Abbas himself drew negative government attention when he published photos of hired thugs that arrested female protestors, and exposed paid pro-Mubarak protesters, and posted controversial video. He has had his Facebook, YouTube and Yahoo accounts shut down under government pressure for his activities, and the government has accused him of being a criminal, a homosexual and having converted to Christianity in attempts to discredit him.

While at its peak around 2005, Abbas said bloggers helped push the envelope for press freedom and political freedom by the opposition, its still under attack and the government’s counter-attacks are working, causing him to lose optimism that real change will happen in Egypt.

It’s hard to see change without international support and that’s hard to get for the situation in Egypt, said Abbas, because there’s not much awareness of the situation internationally. Mubarak is viewed as a moderate friend of the West but people don’t know that Egypt has fake press freedom, fake opposition parties and fake elections, it’s all a mirage.

My turn

I felt a little intimidated and out of place following these two speakers and having heard about the very real challenges and real dangers they face in their activities, and the real change and difference they are making with blogging and social media. It certainly put into perspective our political debates and what gets us upset in Canada, and just how good we really have it. The Conservative may leave nasty comments, but that's as bad as it gets here, by and large.

I gamely pressed ahead though and tried to give a quick overview of the state of blogging and citizen journalism in Canada. I said it’s not as well established here as in many other countries for a number of reasons. One: we don’t have the critical mass of both bloggers and blog readers, and with a free press and a democratic system of open governance we don’t have the same impetus as less free countries to use these tools to counter that and have that freedom.

We don’t have a lot of real “citizen journalism” in Canada but more so opinion and commentary, I said. Blogs tend to be built around communities of interest, and have been successful and useful in bringing those with common interests together, but their ability to influence civil society and public opinion is limited because readerships tend to be limited. In political blogging, for example, I said most readers tend to be very interested in politics already and largely have their minds made-up, so not many people are bring influenced by blogs.

Where blogs in Canada do tend to have the opportunity to influence, however, is via the media. I said that many journalists tend to follow blogs (and Twitter) for news tips, information, and to take the pulse of public opinion, so where blogs can be successful in influencing the narrative is if they can help shape the media narrative.

I did bring up one Canadian challenge around libel law and libel chill, with our law placing the burden of proof on the publisher. With bloggers not having the resources to fight nuisance complaints, this can lead to self-censorship in some fields. I also mentioned that, in addition to government watchdogs, bloggers also see their role as a media watchdog watching for and reporting problems or alleged bias in coverage, something people here found interesting.

In response to a question, I talks about how political parties and activists are investing much time and energy in social media, including officially, but that ability to influence seems limited.

I was asked why blogging isn’t as developed/popular in Canada, and I said I had the impression that blogging is viewed almost as old, as yesterday’s news, and that we’re by and large beginning to move beyond blogging. Micro-blogging and Twitter is where we’re largely moving to now, with its immediacy, simplicity and portability. I spoke about how most of our parliamentarians are now on Twitter, although usage varies, and some government ministers are even engaging with their constituents through tools such as Twitter. I spoke about my twitter exchange with Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, a particularly pertinent example given that the topic of our twitter-exchange was the visa requirements targeting Roma and Mexicans visiting Canada.

Overall, I think it went fairly well and while we lag in blogging I got the impression the use of twitter by our politicians impressed some. I really do think Twitter is a much more powerful tool for direct citizen engagement than blogging, so I hope we'll continue to see its use grow.

And more

Among the speakers to follow on this same topic, Ramon Stoppelenburg from Holland told a very interesting story of how he used his blog to travel around the world by finding people to stay with via his blog, and then blogging about them, their views, their countries and their lives. It became quite popular and he managed to visit 72 countries. He got offers for sponsorship but only accepted purchase of things he needed, such as airline or ferry tickets to get to his next stop.

It really opened his eyes to the other side of the Web, he said, the people behind the Web, and how the views we get of places and issues from the media are often very different from what the situation actually is. The lesson he learned, he said, is that the more we share the more we understand each other, so we should share more of ourselves online.

Form Finland, Andrea Vascellari told an interesting tale of citizen journalism. A few years ago he was out and about in town when he noticed police cars around a school and, calling his office, he learned there had been a major school shooting. He posted a short blog about it via is phone, and very quickly he was getting interview requests from the BBC and other international media. He began doing phone interviews from the site and, thanks to Finland’s advanced mobile communications and wireless infrastructure, uploaded pictures and videos directly from his site to international broadcasters.

He also set limits on his citizen journalism, however: when one organization asked him to interview students and friends of the victims about the shootings he declined; he didn’t think that was appropriate to do. It’s an interesting example of the differences in standards and morals between traditional and citizen journalism, and how with citizen journalism comes an opportunity to redefine the rules.

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Harper and China: It's a mechanism, not a dialogue

Oh, if only I were as educated and wise in the ways and nuance of international diplomacy and language as our esteemed foreign affairs minister,Peter MacKay Maxime Bernier David Emerson Lawrence Cannon.

Because I must admit, the distinction he's trying to draw here to explain how the Conservative reproachment with China on human rights is nothing at all like the Liberal policy his government roundly attacked as morally hollow completly escapes me:

``What's important here is that both parties have decided to look at these issues as we move forward'' Cannon said ``so our people will engage with officials in the Chinese government in the very near future''

The Conservatives suspended the formal human rights talks between the two countries in 2006 after heavily criticizing the former Liberal government's centrepiece of policy engagement with China as being ineffective.

But Cannon insists this is not a resurrection of the Liberal program launched in 1997.

``I don't like using the word human rights dialogue'' he said ``I want to propose a mechanism whereby everybody will feel comfortable as we move forward. ''

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