The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [120]
Some companies have tried to address this issue by introducing ways in which users themselves can report videos that they find offensive, somehow alleviating the burden on their own internal police. So far, however, such features have triggered a disturbing surge in cyber-vigilantism. For example, a well-coordinated group of two hundred culturally conservative users in Saudi Arabia, known as “Saudi Flagger,” regularly monitor all Saudi Arabia-related videos uploaded to YouTube. En masse, they complain about the videos they do not like—most of them critical about Islam or Saudi’s rulers—“flagging” them for YouTube’s administrators as inappropriate and misleading. (The group’s members have a more philosophical take on their work: “All we do is to perform our duty towards our religion and homeland,” Mazen Al Ali, one of the group’s volunteers, told the Saudi daily Al Riyadh in 2009.) Good judgment, as it turns out, cannot be crowdsourced, if only because special interests always steer the process to suit their own objectives.
Perhaps it is only natural that in its quest for more and better eyeballs, digital activism breeds a culture of dependence on large intermediaries, where those with a dissenting viewpoint have to read pages of fine print before sharing their subversive thoughts online. What’s worse, the fine print is often ambiguous and inconclusive. (Who would have guessed Facebook frowns on dolls’ nipples?) Even those who master it in full can never be sure that they are not breaching some arcane rule. While activists can minimize their exposure to intermediaries by setting up their own independent sites, chances are that their efforts may not receive the kind of global attention that they might on Facebook or YouTube. Faced with the painful choice between scale and control, activists usually choose the former, surrendering full control over their chosen platform.
None of the popular Web 2.0 sites have handled such issues with consistency. Some clearly activist content is deemed offensive and removed; some stays on and attracts millions of views. The ensuing uncertainty works against digital activists. Who wants to invest time, money, and effort into building an antigovernment Facebook group only to have it deleted by the site’s administrators? As a result, supporting structures that could have provided fertile foundations for building social capital online never solidify quite fully.
There are no simple remedies for such problems. This is not a fight against almighty Chinese censors; it’s a fight against well-meaning technology types in the Bay Area who, not wanting to turn their sites into playgrounds for terrorists, sadists, or some dangerous fringe movements, tend to overcensor or adopt one-size-fits-all censorship policies that don’t try too hard to study what it is they are censoring. Of course, no one expects Facebook to stop making money and turn their site into a colony of revolutionary cells, but the least they can do is to remove any ambiguity from their censorship process, for it’s the ambiguity that confuses so many activists.
Ultimately, the rapidly growing role of Western intermediaries is yet further proof that the battle for Internet freedom, however ill-conceived it may be, should also be fought in the spacious meeting rooms of Silicon Valley. Winning the battles in Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran won’t automatically turn the Facebooks and Googles