Banned in Turkey - Again!

[UPDATE -- Despite reports that the ban on access to Blogger has been lifted, the block appears to still be in effect (as of March 31, 2011).]

[UPDATE II -- According to this article in Milliyet, the block is still on because the court order to restore service refers to something called "Blogsport," not "Blogspot." Sad, but true.]

This blog, along with every other one hosted on Google's Blogger service, is currently not accessible in Turkey by court order. As was the case the previous time this happened, it appears that some blogs on Blogger are showing clips of Turkish football/soccer matches that cable provider Digiturk has exclusive rights to, prompting the provider to ask the court to take Blogger down. Turkey's problematic (to put it mildly) internet laws allow for sites to be taken down wholesale, rather than simply blocking access to the offending pages. This was the case with YouTube, which was banned in Turkey for years because Google refused to remove a few videos that mocked Ataturk.

Take a look at this previous post for more information about Turkey's misguided internet laws, which not only allow the courts but also a government agency to block access to sites. Meanwhile, Today's Zaman's Andrew Finkel takes a look at the Blogger ban and the wider issue of freedom of expression in Turkey in a column that leaves not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Turkish officials have indicated that new internet-related legislation which should avoid bans like this is coming down the pike, but there is some concern among activists that it could in fact make things worse. According to Yaman Akdeniz, a professor of law at Istanbul's Bilgi University and one of the leading Turkish authorities on internet issues, the new legislation will create four types of centrally-administered filtered profiles that every Turkish internet subscriber will have to sign up for (the default one being a "standard" profile which will also be filtered, although it's not yet clear what will be filtered out). "What they are building is NOT a child protection mechanism but Turkey's Internet Censorship Infrastructure. You can quote me on that," Akdeniz, who has taken a look at the proposed legislation, wrote me in a recent email.

For now, if were in Turkey and tried to find this blog (and are too honest to use proxies), this is what you would reach:

Bu siteye erişim mahkeme kararıyla engellenmiştir.

(Translation: "This site has been disabled by court order.")

The Information Blockade

I am taking a break from flotilla-related writing to report about the latest developments in the ongoing case of Turkey v. Google. As recounted here previously, a ban on Google's YouTube ha been in place in Turkey since 2008 after a court ruled that certain videos that were up on the site violated the law against insulting Ataturk. The ban was made possible by new Turkish legislation that critics have called too broad and too arbitrary. You can read about it here.

In recent days, strange things have been happening with several other Google sites. They aren't quite blocked, but access to them has been slowed down to point of them not being usable. Google Maps, for example, is one of the victims. Turkish officials haven't really explained what's going on, but Turkey's transportation minister, also responsible for internet matters, hinted that there was some kind of tax dispute between Ankara and Google.

What's disturbing about the Google slowdown is that rather than by court order (like in the case of YouTube) this action is being done by Telecommunications Directorate, the government agency that monitors the Internet and which is allowed to shut down sites without a court order. A lawsuit in the matter has already been filed by a group of "media freedom activists" who want the Turkish government to lift its Google blockade. Today's Zaman columnist Beril Dedeoglu writes in Friday's paper about the cost of the slowdown to Turkey's e-commerce and tourism sector. Column here.

Obviously, there will be those wags out there who will somehow try to use the Google affair as further evidence that Turkey is "drifting east." This blog will not join them, except to say that liberally interpreting the rule of law and arbitrarily applying it, as well as thuggishly depriving a country's population access to important knowledge-based services to prove a point in a tax dispute, does certainly smack of some kind of drift, eastward or other.

A Twitter Revolution?

I have a piece up on the Christian Science Monitor website looking at how the repressive conditions in Iran, particularly regarding internet censorship, have made the country ripe for a new-media driven protest movement. The piece also tries to get a handle on just how much of what's happening in Iran can be placed on Twitter and other social media applications.

From the article:

Before Iran, there was Moldova, which had its own (unsuccessful) "Twitter Revolution" back in April, when young activists used online tools to coordinate protests against the country's dubiously reelected Communist government. In Egypt, meanwhile, a new generation of activists has come to embrace Facebook and Internet-based social networking applications to protest (again, mostly unsuccessfully) their repressive government.

But new-media experts say that Iran's civil resistance movement is unique because the government's tight control of media and the Internet has spawned a generation adept at circumventing cyber roadblocks, making the country ripe for a technology–driven protest movement.

"This is a country where you have tens of thousands of bloggers, and these bloggers have been in a situation where the Internet has been filtered since 2004. Anyone worth their salt knows how to find an open proxy [to get around government firewalls and filters], knows how to work around censorship," says Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, Mass. "The Iranian government, by filtering the Internet for so long, has actually trained a cadre of people who really know who to get around censorship."

As the government has cracked down on everything from cellphone service to Facebook, Twitter has emerged as the most powerful way to disseminate photos, organize protests, and describe street scenes in the aftermath of the contested June 12 election. Iranians' reliance on the social-networking tool has elevated it from a banal way to update one's friends in 140-character bursts to an agent for historic changes in the Islamic Republic.

Iran exercises strict control of both the Internet and the mainstream media. In its 2007 World Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders ranked the country 166th of 169 countries, worse than authoritarian regimes such as Burma and Cuba, and only better than Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Eritrea.

And while 35 percent of Iranians use the Internet – considerably higher than the Middle East average of 26 percent – the Iranian government operates what has been described as one of the most extensive filtering systems in the world....

....Some experts, though, warn about overstating the role that new media and technology can play in organizing a successful protest movement.

In the Molodovan case, although Twitter and other new-media technologies might have helped in organizing protests against the country's rulers, the movement fizzled quickly. On the other hand, although the successful 2004 Orange Revolution was helped along by the use of the Internet and mobile phone text messaging, a Berkman Center study found that: "the Orange Revolution was largely made possible by savvy activists and journalists willing to take risks to improve their country."

"You have to be careful about not being too enamored about technology," says Peter Ackerman, founding chair of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in Washington. "It's sexy and it's fun and we can relate to it, but unless there's a strategy for creating loyalty shifts to the other side ... and a set of goals everyone can unify around, you're not going to get to where you need to be."

But while he cautions that it would be incorrect to credit Twitter and other new media with sparking the mass protests in Iran, Ackerman does see them as playing an enabling role to a movement that he says could ultimately be successful – particularly as it moves outside Tehran.

You can read the whole article here.

(A woman using her cell phone in Tehran on Tuesday -- photo by Reuters)

Mapping the Iranian Blogosphere

Erkan Saka directs readers to an interesting report about the Iranian blogosphere published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. Although written last year, the report, entitled "Mapping Iranʼs Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere" and part of the Center's "Internet and Democracy Case Studies" series, offers some good background on the events taking place now in Iran. From the report (pdf version here):

....the question at hand is not whether the Iranian blogosphere provides a Samizdat to the regime’s Politburo, but whether the new infrastructure of the social nervous system, which is changing politics in the US and around the world, will also change politics in Iran, and perhaps move its hybrid authoritarian/democratic system in a direction that is more liberal in the sense of modes of public discourse, if not necessarily in a direction that is more liberal in the sense of political ideology.

[UPDATE -- The OpenNet Initiative, a project run by the Berkman Center and a few other university-based research centers studying the internet, has just published a new study about internet censorship in Iran. The study is available here.]

The Online Conversion of David Ignatius

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius has been taking a beating in Turkey (and elsewhere) for the way he moderated the now famous Davos session that ended with a fuming Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan storming off the stage. To Turks, Ignatius’s efforts to cut Erdogan off and his patting him on the shoulder to signal an end to his comments were the height of disrespect.

But could there be more to the episode than simply bad moderating? It seems like some Wikipedia users wanted to create that impression. Last Friday, I took a look at Ignatius’s Wikipedia entry out of curiosity. I didn’t know much about him, beyond the basic facts of what he’s done and written, so I was interested to find him described as “A Jewish-American journalist of Armenian descent.” Wow – a Turk-hater and Israel-lover rolled into one! No wonder.

The wording of the entry seemed strange, though, as if Ignatius was an Armenian foundling taken in by the kind Jewish Ignatius family. Reading that his father was once secretary of the Navy also seemed strange. A Jewish secretary of the Navy, and there are no other references to this fact anywhere else online? The only thing I could find online about the columnist’s background was a Washington Post piece he wrote that mentions his Armenian heritage. It seemed unlikely that he’s also Jewish. I figured the Wikipedia entry would be corrected soon enough.

The next day, though, I was surprised to take a look at the English-language Hurriyet Daily News & Economic Report and find, in an article entitled “Debate moderator takes flak for actions,” Ignatius described as – per Wikipedia – “A Jewish-American journalist of Armenian descent.” It looked like the reporter simply took Wikipedia’s wording and inserted it directly into the article. After reading the Hurriyet piece, I went back to Ignatius’s Wikipedia entry to find the references to him being Jewish gone. He was still of Armenian descent, only now there were citations for that.

[UPDATE -- Today's edition of the English-language Hurriyet follows up on the Ignatius story and how the paper came to describe him using the false Wikipedia entry. It turns out that Radikal, part of the same publishing group as Hurriyet, used the caption "Jewish journalist" to describe Ignatius after the Davos debacle. Radikal's foreign news editor blames an intern and Wikipedia:

Ceyda Karan, the foreign news editor of daily Radikal blamed that newspaper’s error on an intern downloading of information from Wikipedia. After the newspaper was published, she said, they noticed the mistake and corrected it in Radikal’s Internet version.

According to Karan, Wikipedia had lost credibility as a result. "They claim to offer accurate information. They should have been more careful," she said.]

Looking at the entry’s revision history, though, told a fascinating story of an online battle to convert Ignatius into a Jew. Early on January 30th, he became, thanks to a revision by an anonymous Wikipedia user: “a Jewish-American journalist and novelist.” A few hours later, another user, named Mck134 removed “Jewish” from the entry. The word was reinserted 20 minutes after that, only to be taken out again a half hour later by Mck134, who this time added “of Armenian descent” to Ignatius’s entry. After that is when Ignatius became a Jewish/Armenian hybrid, with the next revision to his entry adding this multiculti clunker: “David R. Ignatius (born to a Jewish family May 26, 1950), an American journalist and novelist of Armenian descent.”

And so it went on throughout the day, with references to Ignatius’s “Jewishness” being reinserted into the entry as soon as they were taken out. Meanwhile, a user who added some citations for Ignatius being Armenian, added a note with his revision that said (in Turkish), “The chump is an Armenian, here is the evidence. Isn’t it a shame that such a person sits next to the prime minister as a moderator?” Ignatius definitively stopped being Jewish towards the end of the day and his entry was put under “semi protection,” which means that only registered Wikipedia users could make changes to it. Still, the old version of the entry has already circulated online though various user groups and other articles.

The point of this story? Of course, on a basic level, it serves as warning about the growing use by reporters of Wikipedia as a primary source of information. But it also adds to the debate over how new media and the online world are becoming another arena for conflict and are encouraging the growth of what’s being called “citizen propaganda,” something I wrote about in a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor. Fanning the flames of conflict – and sadly, in this case, turning Ignatius into a Jew is doing just that – is now as easy as making a quick Wikipedia revision.

The Rise of Citizen Propaganda

My latest article in the Christian Science Monitor looks at how the recent war in Gaza played out online, where a fierce battle of its own was taking place.

Israel's decision to bar reporters from entering the Gaza Strip provided an opportunity for bloggers and other new media voices to fill the void. It also gave a chance for the new media ventures of mainstream media organizations, especially Al Jazeera, to come into their own.

At the same time, elements of the online war over Gaza provided another example of the rise of what some are calling "citizen propaganda." As Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, puts it: "Rather than becoming the cafe of the world, where we interact on common ground, the Net has become a very effective place to rally people to your own cause and try to coordinate their actions."

Zuckerman said something very similar happened last summer's conflict between Russia and Georgia. "I think what has become really interesting is that in an era when you have armed conflict between states, you now have people online looking to see how [they] can become part of that conflict without leaving their computers," he says.

For more background, take a look at this article by Riyaad Minty, a new media analyst at Al Jazeera.