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When we hear the word “censorship,” we usually think of silencing at the hands of government--and yet, with the proliferation of social media platforms, so much of our online speech is now controlled by private intermediaries. These intermediaries, of course, aren’t democratically governed; rather, they are controlled by what journalist Alexis Madrigal recently referred to as “developer-kings,” presumably benevolent rulers in the form of CEOs and policy directors.
As such, the content you post on these sites is subject not to international norms or the laws of your country (although those matter too), but by the rules of each sovereign site. And one platform might, for example, ban photos of mothers breastfeeding, while another might take down activist content it deems too much of a liability.
Over the past few years this issue has been highlighted again and again by various scholars, journalists, and commentators. Author and OnlineCensorship.org board member Rebecca MacKinnon has referred to one popular platform as Facebookistan due to its apparent whims in moderating user content. Scholar danah boyd has suggested that such monopolistic sites are utilities, noting that utilities are regulated. Zeynep Tufekci has compared Facebook to a company town. Ethan Zuckerman has called the phenomenon “intermediary censorship.” And the list goes on...
While it’s true that a user frustrated by one site’s policies can simply choose a different site, the fact is that some of these sites--such as Facebook, with more than 900 million users--are evocative of monopolies; though you can go somewhere else, you’d be missing out on a lot of content and access to other individuals...not to mention a bevy of external websites that now rely on Facebook’s login system.
Lots of individuals are working on these issues, but so far no one has come up with a reporting mechanism that tracks platforms’ behavior and makes transparent their practices. While Herdict.org--an excellent initiative of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society--tracks instances of network censorship, OnlineCensorship.org seeks to track instances of intermediary censorship. We are starting with five popular platforms, and plan to add more in the near future.
If you have been subjected to an act of censorship on any of these platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Google+), submit this act to Onlinecensorship.org as the aggregated data will help discern patterns of censorships happening across geographies. This data will then be presented in a visual powerful manner as reports which, in their aggregated form, will also be made available to academics and journalists upon requests with the knowledge that Onlinecensorship.org will never, at anytime, expose names, or any personal details.
While onlinecensorship.org is currently in English, we are looking to translate onlinecensorship.org into various languages (including Arabic, French, Spanish, etc) if you would like to help translate email translate@onlinecensorship.org with the language you would like to translate.
Future editions of onlinecensorships.org will include other social media platforms and will automate verifications of censorship (i.e. to verify the deletion of accounts, pages,etc)
Follow us on Twitter and Facebook - if you have feedback on ways to improve onlinecensorship.org - please do send us an email.
Has a social media platform deactivated your account or censored your content unjustly? Did they do so in a way that you feel has violated your right to free speech or assembly?
If so, Onlinecensorship.org is the place to file a report on what happened to you.
We will use the information you share with us in three main ways:
Onlinecensorship.org is a project of Global Voices Advocacy. For more about the project’s motivations and plans, please see our Frequently Asked Questions page. The website as you see it right now is in testing phase. Based on the reports and feedback we have been receiveing since the site launch in June, we are working to revise the questions, make a number of other improvements, and add several more social media platforms.
Our team:
Founder & Creative/technical lead: Ramzi Jaber
Project lead: Rebecca MacKinnon, Global Voices Co-Founder
Senior advisor: Jillian York, Electronic Frontier Foundation & Global Voices
Our advisors:
Danny O’Brien, Committee to Protect Journalists
Ryan Budish, Herdict.org
Oiwan Lam, InmediaHK and Global Voices
Ben Wagner, Researcher at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.
Books and papers:
Blogs and articles:
Q: Why are you doing this?
While “censorship” traditionally refers to the suppression of public speech by government, the Internet as we know it is no longer a truly public space. Most online platforms through which we choose to express ourselves - and upon which many of us increasingly depend - are privately owned and operated. With these pirvately owned social media platforms replacing a truly open ‘public sphere,’ we need to be asking some seriuos questions about the role of companies like Google (owner of Google Plus and YouTube), Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo (which owns Flickr) in defining what is or is not ‘acceptable’ public speech.
We believe that Onlinecensorship.org can play an important role in holding Internet companies publicly accountable for the way in which they exercise power over people’s digital lives.
Q: Who runs this website?
Onlinecensorship.org is a start-up project of Global Voices Advocacy, the free speech activism arm of Global Voices, an international citizen media community.
Project lead is Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices. She is author of Consent of the Networked:The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom and has conducted extensive research and writing focused on the role of Internet companies in shaping what citizens around the world can and cannot do with technology - and thus ultimately the public discourse as well as people’s ability to exercise their rights to peaceful speech and assembly.
Creative and technical lead is Ramzi Jaber, a Palestinian social entrepreneur whose most recent projects include TEDxRamallah, an independently organized TED event and Visualizing Palestine, an organization that specializes in data visualization for social justice. An engineer by training, Ramzi is also the cofounder of Thaber, a technology startup that builds products revolving around behavioural economics. During the Spring of 2012 he was a Social Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Standford University’s Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.
Senior advisor is Jillian York, currently Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a member of the Board of Directors of Global Voices. York has conducted extensive research, writing, and advocacy related to the impact of private intermediaries on citizens’ free speech rights.
Q: I am not very familiar with these issues. How can I learn more?
We have a collection of useful articles and books on our resource page, or check out our blog.
Q: Why are you only focusing on five social media platforms?
We have focused the Alpha (test) version of the site on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (owned by Yahoo), Google Plus, and YouTube (the last two both owned by Google) because these platforms exercise power over a large percentage of Internet users. In the next version of the site we plan to add several more platforms, based on our survey of members of the Global Voices international citizen media community as well as a range of other people who heavily depend on social media for their social, cultural, business, religious, or political activities.
Q: How can I see the questions you are asking without filing a report myself?
You can read them on this page.
Q: What are you doing with the data submitted by site users, and do you track submission sources in any way?
We will use the information submitted in several ways.
As activists ourselves, we have a strong commitment to privacy. Information that you submit to us will not be shared with third parties without your express permission. Details of our commitment to your privacy will soon be published in our privacy policy, which is currently being drafted. (Please bear with us - this is a non-profit start-up.)
Q: Can submissions be falsified, or the site gamed? What are you doing to ensure verifiable and accurate data?
During our testing phase, we are manually reviewing all responses, deleting spam, and checking responses to verify whether they are real. During this test phase we may also contact people who have submitted valid e-mails along with their reports to verify accuracy of their data and to ask follow-up questions that will enable us to improve the site.
As the site is developed further we will be adding an automated anti-spam filter. As we review incoming data and identify specific problems around verification and gaming, we will be building both technical and human review solutions.
Q: What if I can’t access Facebook/Flickr/Twitter/Youtube/Google+ at all? All I get is an error message in my browser. Whose fault is that? What can I do about it?
If you can’t access the service at all, most likely that company is not trying to block you. Instead, the problem could be caused by one of any number of things. Perhaps the site is experiencing technical problems. Otherwise, it might be the result of filtering, which can come in many forms. Maybe it is being filtered by whoever controls Internet access at your office, school, cafe or wherever you are currently using the Internet because they don’t want you accessing certain sites or content. Or perhaps your Internet service provider (ISP) is blocking the service. In some countries, government authorities block certain social media services or instruct ISPs to do so. All of these are forms of filtering.
If you would like to file a report about the fact that you cannot access a social media website from your location, please visit our partner website, Herdict.org, which specializes in tracking Internet filtering around the world.
Q: What are your long-term plans for the site?
For the near-term we are working on a number of improvements in terms of the questions we ask of users, visualizations of the information we are receiving, and other features that will make the site easier to understand and use. We also plan to add several more platforms for users to file reports about (most likely Blogspot, Wordpress.com, Tumblr, Pinterest, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Instagram, and Orkut).
In future, if resources permit we hope to launch the site in Chinese, Farsi, Vietnamese, Spanish, Portugese, French, Russian, and Arabic, leveraging Global Voices’ international translation community and relationships with Internet freedom activists around the world. (Websites in those languages will include platforms specific to those languages and regions.)
Q: What about smaller, start-up companies?
While we have focused on a limited number of popular platforms, this phenomenon is not limited to large companies. Similar issues are experienced by users of smaller, startup social media platforms as well. We hope that, by documenting censorship on major platforms, we will be able to inform the public as well as the entrepreneur community about the dangers of policing online speech.
Q: What if I have a suggestion?
Please email us: censorship [at] onlinecensorship.org
Q: How can I support your work?
Please make a donation via Global Voices with a note that your contribution is for Onlinecensorship.org. Your financial support will help us to pay the developers and designers to launch a revised and improved website as soon as possible.
Step 1: Choose social network:
YouTube
Flickr
What type of content was deleted?
Google+
What type of content was deleted?
A project of Global Voices Advocacy
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