North Korea creates Twitter and YouTube presence

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Josh Berglund

By Clark Boyd | The World | August 17, 2010

It is common to use words like “reclusive” and “secretive” when writing about North Korea.

But last Thursday, the North Koreans created a Twitter account – @uriminzok, a shortened version of a Korean word that translates as “our people”.

It already has more than 4,500 followers.

The move to Twitter follows last month’s launch of a North Korean YouTube channel, which now hosts close to 80 videos.

“The North Koreans are technologically literate,” says Hazel Smith, a long-time North Korea researcher at Cranfield University in Britain.

Ms Smith says that the North Koreans have been investing heavily in information technology now for more than 20 years.

“They have a cadre of people who can use modern social networking sites. But the problem for them is the content,” she said.

On the North Korean YouTube channel, that content includes a lot of propaganda laced with bombastic rhetoric; the United States and South Korea are often called “warmongers”.

In a recent Twitter post, the North Koreans said the current administration in South Korea was “a prostitute” of the US.

“As far as content goes, there’s nothing new as far as I can tell,” says Sung-Yoon Lee, professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Boston.

Mr Lee says that the agency responsible for the videos and the tweets is a major arm of the country’s ruling communist party.

“They’ve been putting out stuff like this for years now,” said Mr Lee.

‘Government’s voice’

The irony is that the vast majority of North Korea’s 23 million people have no Internet access, and therefore cannot follow their own government’s social networking sites.

And even if they could follow, they would not be allowed to use social media to criticize the regime, says Gilles Lordet, chief editor of Reporters without Borders in Paris.

“There is absolutely no press freedom at all in North Korea, no independent media,” Mr Lordet said. “There is only the government, the voice of the regime.”

For now, North Korea’s online offerings are only in Korean.

But Professor Lee thinks that they might soon expand their offerings to include video clips and posts in English.

“The North Koreans already produce propaganda material in English, through the Korean Central News Agency,” he said. “They have the wherewithal to do it.”

He added: “It will just take them a little more time and effort.”

PRI’s The World is a co-production between the BBC World Service, WGBH Boston, and Public Radio International. It is heard on public radio stations across the US and on-line at theworld.org.

Court orders YouTube and four other sites blocked over “extremist” content

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Howard Lifshitz

Reporters Sans Frontieres | July 30, 2010

Reporters Without Borders condemns the draconian and disproportionate ruling issued by judge Anna Eisenberg in the Russian far-east city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur on 16 July ordering local Internet Service Provider RA-RTS Rosnet to block access to video-sharing website YouTube and four other websites from 3 August onwards.

YouTube is to be blocked because of a nationalist video called “Russia for the Russians,” which is on a list of extremist content banned by the justice ministry. The other four sites – three online libraries (Lib.rus.ec, Thelib.ru and Zhurnal.ru) and Web.archives.org, which keeps copies of old or suppressed web pages – are to be blocked for having copies of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

“This unilateral decision, blocking entire websites instead of targeting the offending web pages, violates freedom of information and could affect all of Russia’s Internet users,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Russia’s laws on extremism are much criticised because they are used arbitrarily and because they can have such dire consequences as the blocking of independent websites.”

The press freedom organisation added: “There are other mechanisms, envisaged in YouTube’s user conditions, for obtaining the withdrawal of videos that pose a problem. Why did the prosecutor take this case directly to court? Why didn’t he just contact YouTube’s moderators or those in charge of the online libraries to request withdrawal of the offending content?”

The head of the Russian ISP, Alexandre Ermakov, said he would appeal against the ruling and would not execute it because, in his view, he did not have the right to restrict access to information in the absence of any violation of the user conditions of the service offered. He added that he proposed several ways for filtering out access to the offending content, without blocking the entire domain name, but the court ignored him.

Describing the ruling as “contrary to the constitution,” Google said the content of the “Russia for the Russians” video could have been reported to the YouTube moderator as a violation of the user conditions.

Reporters Without Borders added Russia to its “Countries under surveillance” list in the March 2010 update of its “Enemies of the Internet” report (http://en.rsf.org/surveillance-russia,36671.html). The Internet became Russia’s freest medium for sharing information after the Kremlin brought the broadcast media under control at the start of the Putin era.

But the Internet’s independence is being threatened by arrests and prosecutions of bloggers and by the blocking of independent websites on the grounds of “extremist” content. The authorities are also themselves now using the Internet extensively for propaganda purposes.

YouTube has a lot of content, including the Russian president’s TV station.

China Renews Google’s License

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Craig Maccubbin

By David Barboza | The New York Times | July 9, 2010

SHANGHAI — The Internet giant Google said Friday that the Beijing government had renewed its license to operate a Web site in mainland China, ending months of tension after the company stopped censoring search results here and moved some operations out of the country.

Google made the announcement early Friday morning in California in a blog posting by its chief legal officer, David Drummond.

“We are very pleased that the government has renewed our I.C.P. license,” Mr. Drummond wrote referring to an Internet content provider license. “And we look forward to continuing to provide Web search and local products to our users in China.”

Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said Friday that the renewal “was the outcome we were hoping for.”

Mr. Schmidt, who told reporters on Thursday that the company expected to obtain the renewal, said that he did not know China’s decision would come so soon and was informed of the decision early Friday. He had expected the decision to come down within 24 to 48 hours.

“We’ll keep doing what we’re doing, and they’ll keep doing what they’re doing,” he said Friday at the Allen & Company media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.

If the license had not been renewed, Google would have effectively been forced to shut down its Web site, google.cn, in China. With the renewal, however, Google can continue offering limited services in China and direct users to the company’s uncensored Hong Kong-based Chinese language search engine, google.com.hk. Hong Kong, a former British colony that is now a special administrative region of China, is governed separately from the mainland. Under the current setup in mainland China, users can conduct a Google search and see the results, but often they cannot open the links.

The license renewal is a sign that Google, while uncomfortable with operating in China and censoring its search results on Beijing’s behalf, is determined to keep a foot in China, which now has more Internet users than the United States.

Google announced in January that it had suffered China-based cyberattacks on its databases and the e-mail accounts of some users. The company said it would also stop censoring search results, which it had agreed to do when it first began to operate in China several years ago. The Chinese government insists that its citizens’ access to the Internet be stripped of offensive and some politically sensitive material.

In March, Google closed its Internet search service in China and began directing users to the uncensored Hong Kong site.

Many analysts were stunned by the moves and questioned whether Google was acting prudently in risking its spot in the world’s largest Internet market.

Just a few weeks ago, however, Google signaled a softer approach to Beijing by saying that it had stopped automatically sending users in mainland China to its Hong Kong site. The company said it had created a Web page that offered users in mainland China a choice, rather than automatically directing them to its Hong Kong site.

The move, though seemingly insignificant, seemed to comply better with Beijing’s strict regulations.

“This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page,” Mr. Drummond wrote at the time.

Renewal is required annually for Google’s license, which officially expires in 2012.

“This is a reasonable move by the government,” Jake Li, an Internet analyst at Guotai Junan Securities in Shenzhen, told Bloomberg News. “Google has brought itself into compliance with regulations, so there’s no good reason to deny them the license.”

Even before the censorship issue came to the fore, Google was struggling in China to attain the same market dominance it has achieved in many other countries.

The hottest Internet companies in China are those like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba — fast-growing local companies that are making huge profits.

Google is not the only American giant that has had trouble in China. Yahoo and eBay have failed to gain significant traction here. And Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by the government.

Afghanistan begins Internet filtering with Gmail, Facebook

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Colleen Taugher

By Rebekah Heacock | OpenNet Initiative | June, 28 2010

Afghanistan has followed up on its promise to begin filtering the Internet: the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports the country is now blocking Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, YouTube and a host of sites related to alcohol, gambling and sex.

In March, the government announced its intention to begin filtering the Afghan internet, admitting that it lacked the technology but was investigating ways to block sites related to violence, terrorism, pornography or gambling.

Under the Taliban, Afghan citizens were completely cut off from the Internet. The government banned the Internet in 2001 because it contained “obscene, immoral and anti-Islamic material.” In 2006, fewer than just citizen per thousand had Internet access. The current government has made greater Internet access a priority, and in the past decade the number of Internet users in the country has grown from almost none to around 500,000.

While the proposed filtering plan was billed as part of the war against the Taliban, some worry that the government is reverting to Taliban-era control over online content. In an interview with Public Radio International, the BBC’s Dawood Azami notes that the Afghan media are particularly concerned:

But now the government says that there are some websites which are “immoral” and against the traditions of the Afghan people so they are planning to not only block those websites that glorify violence, but they are also trying or planning to block those websites which the Taliban didn’t like…. [The Afghan press corps] are unhappy about this. They say that if these restrictions are imposed, it would mean that the government would be able to block any website they don’t like, or block those websites which are critical of the government. So there is this concern in the journalist community in Afghanistan.

While the desire to restrict access to pro-violence content is understandable, the government’s decision to block such a wide swath of sites — including, the EFF says, Gmail — is harder to justify as part of an anti-terrorist plan.

Pakistan, Turkey Target Google, Other Sites

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | The Wandering Angel

By Tom Wright, Marc Champion And Amir Efrati | The Wall Street Journal | June 26, 2010 

A move by Pakistan to begin monitoring for anti-Islamic content on major websites—including those run by Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.—is the latest sign that censorship looms as a threat to Internet companies in a number of countries.

The Pakistan announcement on Friday came a day after a communications minister in Turkey, which has blocked thousands of sites including Google’s YouTube, said the video site was “waging a battle against the Turkish Republic” and suggested that the situation could change if Google were to register and pay taxes.

Authorities in Pakistan on Friday said they would start monitoring major Internet search engines, including Google and Microsoft Corp.’s Bing.com, as well as the e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. The move follows an action last month against social-networking site Facebook Inc., which Pakistan blocked for several weeks after it hosted a page in which users could post pictures of the Prophet Muhammad. The portrayal of Muhammad is forbidden by Islam, and the ban was lifted when the site removed the page.

A YouTube spokeswoman said it was aware of the actions announced in Pakistan and said it will work to keep its services accessible there. “Google and YouTube are platforms for free expression, and we try to allow as much content as possible on our services and still ensure that we enforce our content policies,” she said.

She added that the company remains “disappointed” about the continuing ban on YouTube in Turkey “against a safe and lawful international service enjoyed by millions of people around the world.”

Regarding Pakistan’s decision, a Microsoft spokeswoman said, “Government decisions to restrict online content should respect the rights of individual users and be adopted through open, transparent and publicly accountable processes.” A spokeswoman for Yahoo said the company “was founded on the principle that access to information can improve people’s lives, and we are disappointed to learn about the monitoring and possible blocking of our sites in Pakistan.” Amazon declined to comment.

Google and other Internet companies have helped some Asian countries, such as India and China, enforce certain standards online by removing material that governments find objectionable or violate local laws. YouTube blocks access to videos in Thailand that might be seen to insult the king—which is against the law in that country—and Nazi imagery that is illegal in some parts of Europe.

Earlier this year Google stopped self-censoring its Internet search results in China after complaining it had been hit with a cyber attack originating from that country. China’s own Internet filters now censor Google’s searches.

A number of countries in the Islamic world, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, have banned Internet content in the past for being sacrilegious. But those countries have authoritarian governments that closely monitor the Internet and the media. In Pakistan, where Islamists have vied with secular-minded politicians since the country’s creation in 1947, the implementation of such bans is fraught with difficulties.

On Friday it remained unclear how the state-run Pakistan Telecommunication Authority would be able to monitor millions of links on the Internet to ensure blasphemous material wasn’t appearing on sites like Google and Yahoo.

In Turkey, Google has been the most prominent victim of a 2007 law that has resulted in the closure of thousands of websites, putting the government under pressure in recent weeks as newspapers and opposition parties have begun to cry foul over the restrictions being placed on ordinary web users.

In May 2008, a Turkish court shut down access to Google’s YouTube due to material posted on the site that was found to be insulting to the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

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Earlier this year Turkey’s communications ministry extended the ban to other Google sites, a move that appeared to be triggered by a separate tax battle with the U.S. giant. As a result, Turks suddenly lost direct access to GoogleMaps and other sites, as well as to YouTube. However, many ordinary users have been able to circumvent the closures.

The opposition People’s Republican Party, usually a fierce defender of Ataturk’s honor, on Thursday attacked the government in parliament for creating what one parliament member called a “culture of censorship” in the country, including Internet censorship.

Some of Turkey’s top leaders have sought to distance themselves from the Internet closures. President Abdullah Gul earlier this month sent out a public message through his account on micro-blogging site Twitter.com, saying he “cannot approve of Turkey being in the category of countries that bans YouTube [and] prevents access to Google.”
Write to Tom Wright at tom.wright@wsj.com, Marc Champion at marc.champion@wsj.com and Amir Efrati at amir.efrati@wsj.com

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