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Chinese Tourists Unwitting Witnesses to Tibetans' Plight

BY Jessica McKenzie | Tuesday, March 25 2014

"The most common sight on the streets of Tibet are Special Police and People’s Armed Police ~~~ Why is this?" (Sina Weibo / ICT)

The International Campaign for Tibet has been collecting social media posts from Chinese tourists about Tibet that reveal far more than Tibetans themselves are allowed to share, and more than foreigners are allowed to see.

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First POST: Collective Hallucination

BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, March 25 2014

Is bulk collection of Americans phone metadata about to end?; more of Upworthy's secret sauce; what the change of ICANN's governance actually means; and much, much more. Read More

WeGov

After Spectacular Twitter Ban Fail, Turkey Becomes First Country To Block Google DNS

BY Jessica McKenzie | Monday, March 24 2014

Screenshot of a Tor graph of usage spiking in Turkey

After the Twitter block in Turkey failed so spectacularly last week—sending the numbers of in-country tweets sky high—the authorities responded by blocking Google DNS, one of the most popular ways of circumventing the Twitter ban. The action has earned Turkey the dubious distinction of being the first country to block Google DNS.

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First POST: Role Models

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, March 24 2014

Applicants to George Washington University have an unusual role model; Is Twitter public, or should you only quote tweets with permission?; the future of open government in Philadelphia; and much, much more. Read More

Voting Information Project Prepares San Francisco Hackathon

BY Miranda Neubauer | Monday, March 24 2014

The Voting Information Project (VIP) is preparing for its third hackathon next weekend in San Francisco, with the aim of encouraging developers to draw on VIP election data and the Google Civic Information API to create tools that make elections information easily accessible to voters. Read More

WeGov

Second "Data as Culture" Exhibit Animates Open Data

BY Jessica McKenzie | Monday, March 24 2014

Screenshot from the short film about the art installation "Invisible Airs"

The second Data as Culture exhibit opens at the Open Data Institute (ODI) in London Monday evening. It features works of art built around and from open data sources, and is meant to provoke questions about data ownership and access and the fine line between public and private.

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WeGov

After Twitter Ban, Turkish Users Post Record Number of Tweets

BY Jessica McKenzie | Friday, March 21 2014

After Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan blocked Twitter Thursday night, Turkish tweets spiked an impressive 138 percent. As of Friday morning, nearly 2.5 million tweets had been sent from Turkey. That's roughly 17,000 tweets per minute, a new record for Turkey.

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First POST: Circumlocution and Circumvention

BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, March 21 2014

Why everybody is talking about the NSA this morning; how Twitter and its users are responding to a crackdown in Turkey; how the Right is getting better at data-driven campaigns; and much, much more. Read More

PDM News: Building a Home for the "Internet Public" in NYC

BY Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, March 20 2014

Cheryl Contee and Erie Meyer at PDF 2013 (Photo by Esty Stein)

For the last nine months, we at Personal Democracy Media have been working on an exciting new project and big idea. It's time to pull back the curtain and tell you about it. We want to build a year-round physical community center, here in New York City, that will be a home for our community and all the people and organizations that we like to say are members of the “Internet public” (per Dave Parry). That is, we want to create a place where the same dynamic and diverse community that comes to Personal Democracy Forum every year--the doers and dreamers, the political activists and the civic hacktivists, public officials, public-minded entrepreneurs, the movement makers and shakers--can work and network together around common interests and solve problems. You can read more about it in our recently submitted Knight News Challenge proposal to help strengthen the open Internet. Read More

First POST: Take Me To the Moon

BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, March 20 2014

Larry Page isn't happy about the NSA; Twitter backs off encrypting direct messages; Zeynep Tufekci explains why social media is a mixed blessing for social movements; and much, much more. Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed today >

China's Porn Purge Has Only Just Begun, And Already Sina Is Stripped of Publication License

It seems that China is taking spring cleaning pretty seriously. On April 13 they launched their most recent online purge, “Cleaning the Web 2014,” which will run until November. The goal is to rid China's Internet of pornographic text, pictures, video, and ads in order to “create a healthy cyberspace.” More than 100 websites and thousands of social media accounts have already been closed, after less than a month. Today the official Xinhua news agency reported that the authorities have stripped the Internet giant Sina (of Sina Weibo, the popular microblogging site) of its online publication license. This crackdown on porn comes on the heels of a crackdown on “rumors.” Clearly, this spring cleaning isn't about pornography, it's about censorship and control.

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wednesday >

Another Co-Opted Hashtag: #MustSeeIran

The Twitter hashtag #MustSeeIran was created to showcase Iran's architecture, landscapes, and would-be tourist destinations. It was then co-opted by activists to bring attention to human rights abuses and infringements. Now Twitter is home to two starkly different portraits of a country. GO

What Has the EU Ever Done For Us?: Countering Euroskepticism with Viral Videos and Monty Python

Ahead of the May 25 European Elections, the most intense campaigning may not be by the candidates or the political parties. Instead, some of the most passionate campaigns are more grassroots efforts focused on for a start stirring up the interest of the European electorate. GO

At NETmundial Brazil: Is "Multistakeholderism" Good for the Internet?

Today and tomorrow Brazil is hosting NETmundial, a global multi-stakeholder meeting on the future of Internet governance. GO

Brazilian President Signs Internet Bill of Rights Into Law at NetMundial

Earlier today Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff sanctioned Marco Civil, also called the Internet bill of rights, during the global Internet governance event, NetMundial, in Brazil.

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tuesday >

Ruck.us Reboots As a Candidate Digital Toolkit That's a Bit Too Like Democracy.com

Ruck.us launched with big ambitions and star appeal, hoping to crack the code on how to get millions of people to pool their political passions through their platform. When that ambition stalled, its founder Nathan Daschle--son of the former Senator--decided to pivot to offering political candidates an easy-to-use free web platform for organizing and fundraising. Now the new Ruck.us is out from stealth mode, entering a field already being served by competitors like NationBuilder, Salsa Labs and Democracy.com. And strangely enough, Ruck.us seems to want its early users to ask Democracy.com for help. GO

Armenian Legislators: You Can Be As Anonymous on the 'Net As You Like—Until You Can't

A proposed bill in Armenia would make it illegal for media outlets to include defamatory remarks by anonymous or fake sources, and require sites to remove libelous comments within 12 hours unless they identify the author.

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Founder Durov On Being Ousted From "Russian Facebook": "Some of What We Managed Is Already Impossible to Undo"

On Monday Pavel Durov, the founder of “Russian Facebook” VKontakte, announced that he was fired—and that he learned of the dismissal from the news media.

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monday >

The Good Wife Looks for the Next Snowden and Outwits the NSA

Even as the real Edward Snowden faces questions over his motives in Russia, another side of his legacy played out for the over nine million viewers of last night's The Good Wife, which concluded its season long storyline exploring NSA surveillance. In the episode titled All Tapped Out, one young NSA worker's legal concerns lead him to becoming a whistle-blower, setting off a chain of events that allows the main character, lawyer Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), and her husband, Illinois Governor Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), to turn the tables on the NSA using its own methods. GO

The Expanding Reach of China's Crowdsourced Environmental Monitoring Site, Danger Maps

Last week billionaire businessman Jack Ma, founder of the e-commerce company Alibaba, appealed to his “500 million-strong army” of consumers to help monitor water quality in China. Inexpensive testing kits sold through his company can be used to measure pH, phosphates, ammonia, and heavy metal levels, and then the data can be uploaded via smartphone to the environmental monitoring site Danger Maps. Although the initiative will push the Chinese authorities' tolerance for civic engagement and activism, Ethan Zuckerman has high hopes for “monitorial citizenship” in China.

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The 13 Worst Bits of Russia's Current and Maybe Future Internet Legislation

It appears that Russia is on the brink of passing still more repressive Internet regulations. A new telecommunications bill that would require popular blogs—those with 3,000 or more visits a day—to join a government registry and conform to government-mandated standards is expected to pass this week. What follows is a list of the worst bits of both proposed and existing Russian Internet law. Let us know in the comments or on Twitter if we missed anything.

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