The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [60]
This also suggests that, as bad as Google and Facebook may look to us, they still probably undercensor compared to most companies operating in authoritarian countries. Global companies are usually unhappy to take on a censorship role, for it might cost them dearly. Nor are they happy to face a barrage of accusations of censorship in their own home countries. (Local companies, on the other hand, couldn’t care less: Social networking sites in Azerbaijan probably have no business in the United States or Western Europe, nor are their names likely to be mispronounced at congressional hearings.)
But this is one battle that the West is already losing. Users usually prefer local rather than global services; those are usually faster, more relevant, easier to use, and in line with local cultural norms. Look at the Internet market in most authoritarian states, and you’ll probably find at least five local alternatives to each prominent Web 2.0 start-up from Silicon Valley. For a total online population of more than 300 million, Facebook’s 14,000 Chinese users, by one 2009 count, are just a drop in the sea (or, to be exact, 0.00046 percent).
Companies, however, are not the only intermediaries that could be pressured into deleting unwanted content. RuNet (the colloquial name for the Russian-speaking Internet), for example, heavily relies on “communities,” which are somewhat akin to Facebook groups, and those are run by dedicated moderators. Most of the socially relevant online activism in Russia happens on just one platform, LiveJournal. When in 2008 the online community of automobile lovers on LiveJournal became the place to share photos and reports from a wave of unexpected protests organized by unhappy drivers in the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok, its administrators immediately received requests from FSB, KGB’s successor, urging them to delete the reports. They complied, although they complained about the matter in a subsequent report that they posted to the community’s webpage (within just a few hours that post disappeared as well). Formally, though, nothing has been blocked; this is the kind of invisible censorship that is most difficult to fight.
The more intermediaries—whether human or corporate—are involved in publishing and disseminating a particular piece of information, the more points of control exist for quietly removing or altering that information. The early believers in “dictator’s dilemma” have grossly underestimated the need for online intermediaries. Someone still has to provide access to the Internet, host a blog or a website, moderate an online community, or even make that community visible in search engines. As long as all those entities have to be tied to a nation state, there will be ways to pressure them into accepting and facilitating highly customized censorship that will have no impact on economic growth.
Wise Crowds, Unwise Causes
Thailand’s extremely strict lèse-majesté laws make it illegal to publish—including in blog and tweet form—anything that may offend the country’s royal family. But effectively policing the country’s rapidly expanding blogosphere has proved very challenging for the Thai police. In early 2009 a Thai MP loyal to the king proposed a new solution to this intractable problem. A new site, called ProtectTheKing.net, was set up so that Thai users could report links to any websites they believed to be offensive to the monarchy. According to the BBC, the government blocked 5,000