The Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program is proud to be a co-sponsor, together with The Laurier Institution, the University of British Columbia Continuing Studies and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, of the 2011 Vancouver Human Rights Lecture.  This year’s speaker will be Ethan Zuckerman whose lecture is titled “Cute Cats and the Arab Spring: When Social Media Meet Social Change“. The lecture will  be held on Sunday November 20th 2011, at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, Vancouver, BC, Canada. For tickets, please visit here.

Cute Cats and the Arab Spring: When Social Media Meet Social Change”

Activists around the world are turning to social media tools usually used for more pedestrian purposes: the sharing of family videos and videos of cats flushing toilets. But these tools can be extremely powerful in the hands of activists, as they are pervasive, easy to use and difficult for governments to censor. Ethan Zuckerman will look at “the cute cat theory” of internet activism, as it helps explain the Arab Spring protests, aggressive internet censorship in countries like China and Vietnam, and the challenges for the corporate owners of social media platforms in an era of online speech.