Blogging the China Earthquake

Chinese citizens have been turning to the Internet for information on loved ones who went missing after an earthquake in Sichuan province took up to 13,000 lives. Twitter, the online tool that allows friends and family members to send short updates to one another via IM, SMS, and social networking sites like Facebook, has helped many Chinese keep each other up-to-date on their safety as well as on news related to the quake.

There's been discussion of Twitters becoming more and more popular as a "platform for serious discourse," used by citizen and professional journalists alike. Twitter apparently broke the news about the earthquake before the earthquake tracking agency, U.S. Geological Survey.

But the influx of information spread via Twitter, as well as YouTube and various blogs, in some cases may be raising more concerns than it's quelling. Many Chinese bloggers are questioning why the government wasn't able to predict the quake and help citizens prepare:

Local media in April noted water suddenly draining from a large pool in Hubei province, east of Sichuan. That report has been snapped up by bloggers looking for natural omens.

Other bloggers have unearthed a statement by a local government bureau in Sichuan, quelling rumours of an earthquake about a week before Monday's disaster.

Some "conspiracies" floating the blogosphere are that the government may have tried to ignore the earthquake out of a "desire for a peaceful Olympics." According to the UK Telegraph:

[Blogger] Shanghaiist posted 90 updates to the story, and started a rumour that the authorities had prior warning of the earthquake which provoked an official rebuke and more chatter across blogs.

The website gathered together material as diverse as reports that spy satellite images of the region were being used in the rescue operation, to the fact that Monday was Buddha's birthday, to a posting about how people killed in the earthquake were "victims of China's economic miracle.

Some have compared the situation to the handling of Hurricane Katrina by New Orleans and the US government. The situation also looks a lot like the 2003 SARS epidemic, when Chinese citizens spread exaggerated accounts of the numbers affected by the disease through SMS, sparking widespread panic and international criticism of the CCP for not better managing the crisis.

Times Online quotes "established journalist" Chang Ping's reaction to the quake:

"...as someone with relatives in the affected area, I could not stop myself from seeking whatever information I could ...”

He added: "The information was clearly unreliable, and it was difficult to tell what was true or false.

"Together it all spoke of a single problem, and that is the people's fierce appetite for information when faced with a public incident."

Most talk about citizen journalism revolves around whether or not it should be considered reliable or professional. On the one hand, this type of panic on the blogosphere could serve to delegitimize the Internet as a news source. But irresponsible blogging could ironically have just as much of a positive impact as the citizen journalists uncovering the truth about the
not-always-transparent Chinese government.

WSJ reports that the state-run Xinhua has "proved surprisingly aggressive at covering the earthquake in Sichuan province" to protect the country's reputation now that they have millions of competing accounts being spread through the Internet:

A regulation promoted as increasing government transparency took effect just two weeks ago. The regulation urges government officials to disclose more information to the public, including "information on the management, usage and distribution of social donations in funds and in kind for emergency and disaster relief."

At the same time, the leash has tightened on the country's news media. Just last August, the government approved a law restricting news outlets in covering natural disasters. The law says that "units and individuals are prohibited from fabricating or spreading false information regarding emergencies and government efforts to cope with emergencies," according to a Xinhua report at the time.

Though the law was aimed more at relative muckrakers, Xinhua was affected too. Yet since the earthquake, it has filed more than 200 reports and updates...

The verdict isn't clear when it comes to Xinhua's performance in covering the disaster. "Are they going to ask deeper questions about possible early warnings?" [David Bandurski, a researcher with the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong] says. "We'll wait and see."

Viewer Protection or Political Suppression?

Following the violence in Tibet the past several weeks, China has blocked access to YouTube and other websites showing videos of the riots. The Wall Street Journal ran a story last week about the inconsistencies in YouTube’s censorship policies in Asia and the Middle East:

In Thailand, in order to be accessible, [YouTube] agreed to block Thai users from seeing clips deemed insulting to the king in violation of Thai law. In Turkey, YouTube has suspended the account of the person who uploaded the Ataturk video, though the site remains banned there. In Myanmar, YouTube was banned after clips of protesting monks appeared on the site. In that case, YouTube declined to remove the clips and remains banned.

Media analysts say YouTube's string of censorship flare-ups -- and the site's sometimes inconsistent responses -- indicate it needs to develop a more transparent strategy for dealing with these issues. YouTube's community guidelines state the site encourages "free speech and defend[s] everyone's right to express unpopular points of view." But the site also reserves the right to remove content it deems inappropriate, which gives it significant discretion when it comes to politically sensitive content.

The article states that YouTube often has to choose between “bending to censorship and losing business opportunities.” But YouTube isn’t just bending to foreign governments, and censorship is more than a business development issue.

The WSJ article leaves out mention of the Egyptian political turmoil and violence which was caught on video last fall by activist and YouTube user Wael Abbas. Abbas is the first blogger to receive the Knight International Journalism Award for his work, which led to the conviction of police for torture, but YouTube suspended his account. The nearly 100 images “including clips depicting purported police brutality, voting irregularities and anti-government demonstrations” that Abbas had uploaded were blocked, not just in Egypt but worldwide.

According to Reuters, YouTube told Abbas that the videos generated complaints about the content of torture. Human rights activists protested, including Gamal Eid, head of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, who argued that the intent of Abbas to expose human rights violations should have been taken into account. Abbas’ access was restored in December and the majority of his clips were allowed back online.

The WSJ article discusses a similar case in Russia:

After being alerted by users last month, YouTube removed a video clip that appeared to document abuse of prisoners at a Russian prison camp that YouTube determined violated the site's graphic-violence policy. It eventually restored the video but required viewers to click to consent to watch a clip that "may contain content that is inappropriate for some users." YouTube says its staff hadn't initially been aware that the video was meant to document alleged human-rights abuses.

Where is the line between protecting viewers and censoring content of political value? Should YouTube be required to develop more consistent guidelines when it comes to political censorship, and in doing so is it YouTube's responsibility to decipher users’ motives?

Level Playing Field? IOC to allow limited athlete blogs at Beijing Games

The International Olympic Committee has decided to allow athletes to blog during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Many unofficial blogs have appeared during previous competitions.

But there are draconian restrictions regarding what content an athlete can post. The IOC has taken the tack that blogs are personal expression, not journalism, and it is guarding the intellectual property associated with the event and the broadcast rights. For example, video and still photography of events and medals ceremonies is disallowed or limited.

Is this censorship in the name of branding? "Domain names for blogs should not include any word similar to 'Olympic' or 'Olympics,'" reports The Canadian Press. I would think Olympics qualifies as public domain after several thousand years; fair use at the very least.

Has anyone heard how the IOC intends to enforce this policy? In addition to the usual medals being stripped for steroid use will we see an angry IOC dragging athletes to court for copyright infringement?

China's "Mental Firewall"

Today’s Wall Street Journal reported on bloggers in China and touched on two important issues discussed previously on the Ethical Blogger: trust and credibility on the Internet in China and the blogger Zola’s influential corruption coverage. The main emphasis of today’s WSJ article, however, was on the role of self-censorship, rather than government controls, as a hurdle to free speech on the Internet:

China’s 162 million Internet users are a largely young and wealthy set who typically aren’t engaged in politics. Most don’t seem intent on accessing the sort of content that would upset the authorities. They are busy amassing virtual weapons in online games and posting photos to blogs.

But when content does get political, the government doesn’t have to do all the censoring itself…

China’s Confucian values teach respect for authority and the subordination of the individual to the family and state. In China’s rigid education system, young people rarely are encouraged to express their opinions. And people have learned to keep quiet as political orthodoxies changed with the wind over the decades, with leaders coming into power, then falling out of favor as new regimes installed themselves. Finding yourself on the wrong side could lead to punishment, including exile and jail.

The Chinese government has made it very clear to the public that the tradition of harsh punishment for dissidence extends into cyberspace. In addition to placing rigid barriers to market entry on Internet companies, making it difficult for independent Internet service and content providers to compete with State controlled entities, the Chinese government has laid out rigid regulations for companies and individual Internet users to follow. Companies that skirt the rules can be subject to fines of up to RMB 50,000, closure of sites, and revocation of business licenses, while in extreme cases, individual cyberdissidents have been sentenced to life in prison or the death penalty. This alone has deterred a number of Internet users from pushing their limits.

In some instances the line between self-censorship and government censorship is blurred. A May 2006 New York Times article entitled “As Chinese Students Go Online, Little Sister Is Watching” spotlights Hu Yingying, a student at Shanghai Normal University who monitors the university’s discussion boards and steers conversation away from politics or other sensitive topics:

Part traffic cop, part informer, part discussion moderator — and all without the knowledge of her fellow students — Ms. Hu is a small part of a huge national effort to sanitize the Internet. For years China has had its Internet police, reportedly as many as 50,000 state agents who troll online, blocking Web sites, erasing commentary and arresting people for what is deemed anti-Communist Party or antisocial speech.

But Ms. Hu, one of 500 students at her university's newly bolstered, student-run Internet monitoring group, is a cog in a different kind of force, an ostensibly all-volunteer one that the Chinese government is mobilizing to help it manage the monumental task of censoring the Web.

These tactics haven’t completely eliminated sensitive political discussion. Cyberdissidents in China use email spamming techniques to dispense information. Li Hongkuan, who goes by the alias Richard Long, began sending a newsletter called VIP Reference News out to roughly 250,000 people in via email. His newsletter is actually a banned website, but Li is able to provide his otherwise unavailable information to the masses because email recipients can claim that it was unsolicited and avoid punishment (although some suppliers of email addresses were jailed). Other modern communications tools like text messaging have been crucial to organizing protests, and since cell phone use is more widespread than the Internet in China’s rural areas, this may for now be a better tool for disseminating information and mobilizing the masses.

So perhaps blogs don’t provide complete insight into the spectrum of controversial activities going on in authoritarian regimes, as dissidents may be finding it more beneficial to spread their influence through multiple communications outlets.

Anonymity as Credibility

As I mentioned previously, anonymous blogging makes more sense in a regime whose government is not representative. A very good article in the Asahi Shimbun today "Sizing up China: Internet posing a sensational and credible challenge."

Here is the kicker:

Chinese prize the Internet because it is a relatively free forum to express their opinions. According to a 2005 survey by the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences, 60.8 percent of Chinese respondents said that people have more opportunities to criticize the government on the Internet. The number was much greater than 24.2 percent in Japan, 20 percent in the United States and 10.1 percent in Sweden.

"People's enthusiasm for the Internet is the flip side of the government's tight control of the conventional media," said a reporter of one of China's state-run news agencies, who declined to be named.

She said that she often writes news and opinions on her three anonymous Web blogs that she cannot write in the company's wire reports.

"The irony here is that the Internet is viewed as a credible media, because of its anonymity," the reporter said. (IHT/Asahi: November 5, 2007)

Headless Monsters?

As I recently wrote in Fairer Globalization blog, there is a lot of anxiety around the world about whether traditions can be maintained in a globalized world. In Japan this week, I picked up a copy of the Daily Yomiuri, which featured an essay titled "'Headless monster' changing society."

Its author describes how leaderless movements or "headless monsters" can emerge more easily from blogging and wired communities. As we have seen numerous times in South Korea, in China, a blogger was empowered to make change. A blogger forced the closure of a Starbucks in Beijing's Forbidden City.

But the author wonders if such movements could lead to more sinister results:

...what makes me uneasy is the frequent and recent occurrence of copycat crimes. Every time details about an offense--types of lethal weapons, methods and relationships between culprits and victims--are reported, imitations of those crimes emerge. Fortunately, as reports of this kind also tend to become quickly obsolete, the chain of copycat crimes breaks in most cases in Japan after a spate of a few imitative offenses.

Meanwhile, I dread the assumption that Islamic extremists are in a situation similar to the above-mentioned ones. There is a strong possibility that they, too, have collectively become a headless monster, with Osama bin Laden sighted in the far background after rootless developments due to immigration and urbanization, involving them first in anticommunist campaigns and then in anti-U.S. ones and sectarian strife.