One myth about the Internet in authoritarian states that I've been trying to debunk is that their regimes and state bureaucracies are somehow slow at adapting cutting-edge technology (i.e. they don't have staffers who read Wired magazine or memorize the uber-lucid prose of Yochai Benkler).
However, the situation is usually much more complex, and if the state apparaturs is well-organized and not too distracted, there is a good chance that it will actually be much faster at experimenting with cool new technologies and the ideas behind them.
For example, "crowdsourcing", coined by Jeff Howe (who is a contributing editor to Wired, no less) remains a buzzword du jour. There's been no shortage of coverage of how activists and NGOs are turning to crowdsourcing to analyze data, map human rights violations, scrutinize the voting records of their MPs, and even track illegal logging in the Amazon.
Great. What received far less coverage is how governments are also relying on crowdsourcing to identify dissenters and muzzle free speech. The Thai hardliners were the true pioneers with their project Protect The King, where anyone could submit a link to a site that they thought was offensive to the country's ruler (whose venerable reputation is already very strictly protected by the tough lese majeste laws).
This week I discovered another example: a project from Saudi Arabia called (sic) "SaudiFlager" (thanks to the always excellent SaudiJeans blog for the pointer). The campaign urges concerned Saudis to "flag" (i.e. mark as abusive) video clips that they think are offensive to Saudi Arabia (here is their YouTube page). The logic is that if even people flag the same videos, YouTube will eventually bow down and remove them. I assume there are also numerous back channels where "flaggers" could collaborate on what videos to remove from the site.
I am wondering what kind of mechanisms YouTube and others would devise in the future to make sure that their editorial decisions on what really counts as "violent" and "offensive" are balanced and fair and not just the result of organized pressure of "flagging" campaigners. The more I think about it, the more I get convinced that it would be very hard to do it relying only on quantitative measures alone - Google and others would inevitable need to hire area experts (perhaps, even anthropologists) to make sense of local Internet cultures, which are too deep for Google algorithms to penetrate and make sense of...
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