To start out the discussion, MacManus pointed out that it was the read/write aspect of the Internet that spawned the growth of social networks like Facebook and Twitter over the last few years. In the Western world, this development allowed users to connect and express their thoughts freely. In China, however, even though the same tools are available as in the West, a lot of them are currently blocked and censored. In addition to this, Ai Weiwei noted that sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, as well as TV channels like CNN, are currently blocked in China.

Even though there are a number of Facebook and Twitter clones in China, Ai Weiwei argued that those companies work within the framework that the Chinese government has set for them with regards to what users can say on these services. Ai Weiwei's name, for example, can never be used on these sites without getting censored. Indeed, said Ai Weiwei, using Twitter in China is "very physical and dangerous."

Translating Twitter

Asked about the reason for Twitter's popularity among netizens, Ai Weiwei noted that services like Twitter and blogs are easy to use, but once he got too popular, his blog was quickly shut down. Even though Twitter has a 140-character limit, Twitter's users in China can easily express in-depth thoughts because the Chinese language allows Twitter users to express 140 words on Twitter and not just 140 characters.

With regards to how Twitter is being used in China, Ai Weiwei noted that the most active Twitter users in China often use the service for political and philosophical discussions.

Jack Dorsey, after recapping the basic history of Twitter and his fascination with maps, and open, public databases, noted that messages on Twitter, even though they are often trivial, do show that "we are human" and remind us that we are all the same. Twitter, which he called a utility, was extended by the user and the developer ecosystem that grew up around it. Internet users across the world can now use it to communicate, talk to their governments, build a business and create political movements.

Ai Weiwei told Dorsey that the "Chinese people think you are some kind of God" because Twitter allows people to express themselves without worrying about censorship.

A lot of the discussion with Jack Dorsey focused on had to do with what Twitter can do to to help its users in China. Ai Weiwei directly asked Dorsey why Twitter doesn't provide its users a Chinese-language version of Twitter. According to Dorsey, it is just a question of time and mostly a technological issue. Given Twitter's problems with scaling the service, making it work for every character set creates some issues for Twitter because of the legacy framework that Twitter established in its early days. Currently, the company doesn't really have the resources to devote to this. Doresey did, however, argue that users already know how the service is meant to work and understand the setup of the Twitter page.

Dorsey also noted that Twitter isn't sure that it really wants to move into the Chinese market, but would like to offer a Chinese translation of its service at some point. Indeed, Dorsey noted that he wasn't even aware that Twitter was blocked in China until just a few weeks ago.

Censorship and Twitter

MacManus then asked Ai Weiwei if the Chinese government couldn't just censor Twitter or force Twitter to censor its service. Ai Weiwei, however, pointed out that Twitter could easily translate Twitter's registration page to help Chinese users. He noted that he isn't asking Twitter to set up an operation in China - he just wants Twitter to make the service easier to use for Chinese users and to translate large parts of the service. The Internet companies in China, as MacManus noted, tend to "self-discipline" themselves and censor their own content. MacManus wondered what would happen to a Chinese language version of Twitter, and if it wouldn't just get blocked and censored just like other international services.

Ai Weiwei noted that a lot of international companies that would like to enter the Chinese market have a responsibility to not give up on basic human rights. While the discussion didn't go into depth with regards to the issues surrounding Google's exit from China, MacManus noted that Google was one of the few Western services that entered the Chinese market, even though it faced a strong Chinese competitor. According to MacManus, leaving the Chinese market was a "brave move" by Google that sends a strong message that these companies are willing to stand up to the Chinese government.

Twitter's Moral Responsibility

Twitter and other technology companies have, said Dorsey, a responsibility to follow basic moral guidelines, and in his view, many technology companies have helped to push the messages of the U.S. government (and other governments) forward with regards to acknowledging human rights violations in China.

Asked specifically if companies do have a moral responsibility, Dorsey said that Twitter - as a company - is focused on opening information as completely as possible and wants to ensure that everybody can participate in the conversations on the service. Twitter, which according to Dorsey was founded around the principles of immediacy and transparency, allows users to create a shared experience among users around the world and create more empathy.

Towards the end of the discussion, Dorsey said that Twitter is just a tool and that it can't change any governments itself, but that it is the users who can use it to change governments.

As MacManus noted during the discussion, it is people like Ai Weiwei that are using these tools effectively. One day, Ai Weiwei noted towards the end of the discussion, we won't need tools like Twitter to change our governments anymore.

In the presentation, Kuo (who also spoke to ReadWriteWeb a week ago) clarified how censorship in China works. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the Great Firewall that has the most impact in China - but something China calls "self-discipline." Kuo also discussed what the next moves will be from Google, since he believes that the ball is in Google's court and Beijing won't push the situation.

Before getting down to the nitty gritty of the current Google-China standoff, Kaiser Kuo gave some valuable context to Google in China.

In 2005 Google started to hire aggressively in China, he said. Google's decision to enter China with a censored product immediately brought grief to Google, with some pundits describing it as a "black day for Internet freedom." Google defended its actions at that point by saying that not providing search to a fifth of the world's population would be a greater loss than having censored results.

At first Google had a notice on their search results stating that they were censored. Kuo also pointed out that Google only omitted results that users wouldn't have been able to view anyway had they clicked through (because the pages or sites were blocked). At that point, Google didn't host Gmail, personal search history, Blogger or other services that had personal information. Google in China also protected their employees, Kuo noted.

Google never had an easy time of it in China. For example, many Chinese users couldn't spell the word "Google." Regulators made it difficult for them, as did their Chinese competitors. Google did manage to make good revenues and market share, but never "moved the needle" against its Chinese search competitor Baidu. Kuo remarked that Google was not singled out for any special treatment by the Chinese government.

In 2009 Google got into trouble due to pornography in its search results, and it went dark for a short time as a result.

There has been a massive growth in Internet users in China in the four years since Google entered that market. There were 2-3 million Internet users in China when Google began operations there; now there are 384 million Internet users in China. Google has around 35% market share in China, which has not been matched by any other Western company. Its annual revenues in China is around $300-400 million in revenue, which is nothing to sneeze at.

In mid-December 2009 there was a hacker attack on Google, which in January Google claimed on its blog came from China. At that time Google also announced it would stop censoring search results on google.cn. Kuo doesn't believe this announcement was a cynical retreat from China due to its being defeated by Chinese competitors, which many pundits suggested at the time.

Kuo said that the challenge to Google's business model is around trust, for personal data in the cloud. So Google's blog post in China was appropriate, Kuo believes.

Some people have suggested that the Chinese government used the strategy known in China as "Using Quiescience to control action." The government has however unblocked Google Docs and Groups, and has not blocked any further Google services since January.

Currently Google is still hiring in China and is in the midst of negotiations with the Chinese government. Kuo believes there is deliberate confusion right now."It's impossible to grasp what Google is up against without having a better grasp of how censorship in China works."

The Great Firewall

There are two main types of Internet censorship in China, said Kuo.

The first is The Great Firewall of China, which has been nick-named "Iron Curtain 2.0." It's a system of filters at domain name or page level. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and other western sites have been blocked at this level. Kuo said that it's fairly simple for Chinese Internet users to "hop the firewall " using proxy services, free VPNs.

So The Great Firewall is more of an inconvenience. Kuo pays for a VPN that allows him to access Western websites.

Self-Discipline

The second form of censorship is "more pernicious and effective," according to Kuo. It is carried out by Internet companies, on instructions from Chinese government. All Internet sites in China have to practice what is termed "self-discipline."

Failing to adhere to this form of censorship means having your website or service shut down. There are some 30,000 "Internet police." Two cartoon avatars are wont to show up if a Chinese user visits pages with content offensive to the Chinese government.

Most Internet users in China don't come across the Great Firewall, because most Chinese Internet users don't use Western services like Twitter and Facebook. But, Kuo said, "Google is different." It has become "a real part of the Internet culture in China."

Kuo then talked about how Chinese censorship nowadays is almost all social media sites, such as social networks and microblogging sites.

How Chinese Netizens Use The Internet

Kuo mentioned that the Chinese Internet is more "entertainment superhighway" than "information superhighway." Online gaming is big in China. Most Chinese Internet users, Kuo said, enjoy the Internet that they have - rather than worry about the one that Western pundits think they should have.

The Internet has also emerged as a de-facto public sphere in China. As long as you don't overstep certain boundaries (political activism and so forth), then the "will of the masses" is often expressed on the Internet through the likes of bulletin boards or social networks.

Regularly, Chinese netizens are exposing public officials. However Kuo warns that there are "very very serious limits" to what is emerging in the public sphere. For example, anonymity leads to a lot of trolling. It's ad-hoc, reactive and informal - however it is a "squeaky wheel that is regularly getting grease." Also, a minority are pro-democracy - most of the netizens in the public sphere are pro-Chinese government.

Next Moves from Beijing and Google

Kuo said that the Chinese government will wait for Google to make the next move. It realises it has nothing to gain by pushing Google or being openly hostile. The ball is in Google's court and it will probably keep to its word that it will stop censorship in China. It may still shut down operations in China, which in practice means closing google.cn. But this has a lot of problematic scenarios - including the difficulty of having translations done for Google.com and staffing issues of closing down.

The pros of pulling out of China include saving face and appeasing western users. But the cons are significant. They include a backlash from tech-savvy, urban Google users, a setback to scientific research, a global black eye for their image, and ceding the virtual monopoly in search in China to Baidu.

The moderate scenario is that Google.cn is shut down, but continues to work with its mobile partners in China, R&D and sales continue to operate in China, and Google services will be unblocked.

The best case scenario, Kuo believes, would be if Google stopped censoring google.cn - but the service stays online.

It's not surprising that as access to the Internet expands, more and more dictators and tyrants will try to suppress it. But what's troubling about this year's report is the inclusion of two democratic countries: Australia and South Korea.

Australia's proposed online filtering system is something RWB says it has "never before seen in a democracy." Additionally, in the state of South Australia it's now against the law to be anonymous online if it's in the context of an election.

In South Korea, a new censorship law allows for five-year prison sentences for anyone found using the Internet "to disseminate false news intended to damage the public interest." The same law requires online visitors to register their real name and national ID card number when visiting sites with more than 100,000 members.

Here are a handful of the worst violators of online freedom of expression on the Enemies of the Internet list:

Burma

Two high-ranking government officials have been sentenced to death for having e-mailed documents abroad. Net censorship is a serious matter in Burma. Massive filtering of websites and extensive slowdowns during times of unrest are daily occurrences for the country's Internet users. The legislation governing Internet use - the Electronic Act - is one of the most liberticidal laws in the world.

China

As its polemic with Google and the United States on the Internet's future unfolds, China continues to intensify Web censorship, faced with an increasingly forceful online community.The much-vaunted promises made by organizers at the open ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have proven to be mere illusions for the world's biggest netizen prison. Expanded dissemination of propaganda, generalized surveillance and crackdowns on Charter 08 signatories are commonplace on what has become the Chinese Intranet - with significant consequences for trade.

Egypt

More than a mere virtual communications tool, the Egyptian Internet has become a mobilization and dissension platform. Although website blocking remains limited, authorities are striving to regain control over bloggers who are more and more organized, despite all the harassment and arrests.

Iran

Iran, one of cyber-censorship's record-holding countries, has stepped up its crackdown and online surveillance since the protests over the disputed presidential reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, 2009. The regime is demonizing the new media, which it is accusing of serving foreign interest.While a dozen netizens are serving out their terms in Evin Prison, bold Internet users are continuing to mobilize.

Saudi Arabia

An emerging bloggers' community is up against harsh censorship. These bloggers are confronting the traditional forces of Saudi society, which are attempting to prevent the Internet from becoming a forum for free discussions. Saudi Arabia is one of the first countries to have been authorized to write Internet domain names in Arabic.The Internet penetration rate, currently estimated at about 38% of the population, is rising. How- ever, it is still one of the most repressive countries with regard to the Internet.

Syria is reinforcing its censorship of troublesome topics on the Web and tracking netizens who dare to express themselves freely on it. As a result, social networks have been particularly targeted by omnipresent surveillance. The promised technological improvements are slow to materialize. The authorities' distrust of the potential for dissident online mobilization may be playing a role in this delay.

The progress made by Vietnam in the domain of human rights, which allowed the country to become a member of the World Trade Organization in 2007, is nothing but a distant memory. As the 2011 Communist Party Congress draws nearer, the regime is muffling dissident views on the Internet, and its first target is critics of the country's policy toward China.

As a lead-up to the upcoming event in New York City with Chinese digital activist Ai Weiwei, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and yours truly, I interviewed Mary Joyce about the strategies and success stories of digital activism.

MJ: The new organization is called the Meta-Activism Project (MAP) and its goal is to build the field of digital activism by catalyzing a body of strategic knowledge unique to the field.  Today's digital activist is in an untenable position: caught between the 100-ton rock of pre-digital strategy and the thousand slippery pebbles of highly-contextual tactical knowledge that focuses on a seemingly endless stream of new social media applications.  We want to build a new body of activism strategy that recognizes the radically different communications infrastructure of the digitally networked world.

I am really excited to announce the official launch of the Meta-Activism Project on ReadWriteWeb! The site - http://meta-activism.org - went live at the end of last week and, though it is pretty bare now, we'd like it to be a central location for people interested in building a body of knowledge about the fundamental mechanics of digital activism.

RWW: We've heard a lot about Twitter being used in Iran last year, and the subsequent blocking of social media services like Twitter and Facebook in China. What other countries have social media tools had a big impact in, for digital activism?

MJ: Judging impact is quite tricky in the field of digital activism, as few cases of digital activism are actual successes.  Usually we judge the success of an activism campaign by whether the activists achieved their campaign goal.  However, in almost all of the famous cases of digital activism "success" - the post-election mobilizations in Iran and Moldova in 2009 or the 2008 general strike in Egypt - while activists did successfully mobilize using social media, they did not achieve their campaign goal, be it to overturn an allegedly fraudulent election result or the wide range of social and political reforms demanded by the strike organizers. 

Mary doing digital activism training at Video Camp Goa

The measuring of impact thus becomes extremely subjective.  Digital activism proponents want to count mobilization as success even when the goal is not achieved, while skeptics and pessimists point out that, by traditional measures, most digital activism campaigns are failures.  Though I am certainly a proponent of digital activism, I would actually side with the skeptics here.  In order to really push the field forward, we need to set high standards for digital activism success and not be satisfied with half-measures. 

RWW: Facebook and Twitter are the two most high profile social media tools being used for digital activism. Are there any other Internet tools that have had success, that perhaps people aren't as aware of?

MJ: I could tell you, but that tool would probably become outdated in a few months, or would prove useless out of its original context.  That's the problem with tactical knowledge: tools change, contexts change, and activists are forever playing catch-up. 

Probably the greatest factor which determines the utility of an application to activists is scale and "use neutrality."  Scale means that the tool needs to reach a certain critical mass of users before you will have the network effects that will either make it likely that activists will become aware of it (in the case of something like Tor or proxy servers) or, in the case of social platforms, that enough people will be on the platform to constitute a meaningful audience for an activist message. "Use neutrality" means that it can be easily co opted, that its architecture can facilitate a wide variety of interactions and does not dictate the content of hosted files.  YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger are use neutral, LastFM and Bloglines are not. 

Mary at the Women's Leadership and Technology Conference, Sharjah, UAE

RWW: Over the past year or so, can you describe a couple of success stories for digital activism using web tools.

MJ: Ha! More about measuring success. With the lack of true success, it is no wonder that people are so eager for these stories.  I think the traditionally-defined successes in this field (i.e. when the campaign goal is achieved) are much smaller and less dramatic - NGO meets fundraising goal through online donations (multiple cases), bloggers get a corporation to withdraw an offensive advertisement (e.g. Motrin), a social network lifts a questionable national block (e.g. LinkedIn in Syria). 

In the high-stakes activism campaigns that intend to make dramatic changes at the national and international level, I would say that we have cases of successful mobilization - Iran, Moldova, Egypt - without successful campaigns.

RWW: In terms of China, a lot has been written about the censorship there - both the Great Firewall that blocks certain sites and domains, and the self-censorship that many companies have to do in order to survive. Currently Google is trying to challenge censorship, but we're not sure how successful even a hugely influential company like Google will be. So what, if anything, can ordinary people do in terms of digital activism to support the freeing up of the Chinese Internet? 

MJ: I am not an expert on China, but it seems like the best strategy for defeating the Great Firewall is to make it obsolete: create so many ways of getting around it that it no longer successfully censors Chinese Internet users.  This means both creating new circumvention tools - more Psiphons, proxies, Tors, FreeGates - and finding new and innovative ways to get those tools to Chinese users.

RWW: Thanks Mary for this illuminating interview. We at ReadWriteWeb wish you the best with the newly launched Meta-Activism Project!

Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu were some of the first Twitter clones to become successful in China.

An October 2009 report by China Daily noted that Fanfou was founded in July 2007 by Wang Xing, a young entrepreneur who also founded China's current most popular social network Renren (formally known as Xiaonei). Both Renren and Fanfou were almost carbon copies of their U.S. equivalent services - Facebook and Twitter respectively.

Weibo Rises to Take Fanfou's Place

Since the closure of Twitter, Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu, other services have risen to take their place. Taotao (owned by the company that produces popular IM service QQ) and Zuosa.com are two examples.

However it is Weibo that has emerged to become the biggest micro-blogging service in China. Weibo is owned by Sina.com, a huge portal company in China, and is connected to Sina's blogging platform.

Weibo is very much like Twitter, in that it allows users to post short messages 140 Chinese characters or less via the Web, SMS or MMS. Although according to Chinese Internet expert and Beijing resident Kaiser Kuo, in Chinese 140 characters can actually produce quite a long message.

The major difference between Weibo and Twitter, according to Kuo, is that Weibo is censored. Or in the parlance of Chinese Internet users, it is "harmonized."

Sina's Weibo probably has a much greater chance of surviving than its counterparts like Twitter and Fanfou, because it knows how to self-censor. Meng Bo, deputy editor-in-chief of Sina.com and project manager of Sina Weibo, told China Daily in October that "Sina is playing by the rules as they are laid down, with strict word filtering in operation."

According to Meng, there are two teams of staff "keeping close watch to ensure there is no vulgar content or anything that violates the rules."

Would Twitter Succeed in China Anyway?

China's surviving micro-blogging services are tightly controlled by the censorship climate in China.

However even if Twitter became available again in China, would it take off with mainstream Chinese Internet users? Kaiser Kuo thinks that it wouldn't, because of the popularity of currently operational services like Weibo and Taotao. He remarked that although there would be an uptake in the number of users on Twitter, if it was ever to be made available again, Weibo and others will have gained too much momentum by then.

In this first post of a series, we outline the most popular social network sites in China. In follow-up posts, we'll look at Twitter clones, online video, and censorship. This series is based on a discussion I had with Kaiser Kuo, a Beijing-based expert on China's Internet.

There are 3 social networking sites that are clearly in the lead in China, according to Kaiser Kuo.

Renren.com is the leading social network. It began as a Facebook clone called Xiaonei.com - which means 'on campus' in Chinese. In August 2009 it changed its name to Renren, which means 'everybody.' Renren had 70 million registered users at that point. The site is owned by Oak Pacific Interactive and has had over $400M pumped into it by investors Softbank.

The site was founded in December 2005, shortly after Facebook began to ramp up. Its founder Wang Xing later founded Fanfou, a popular Twitter clone (see our next post in this series).

Xiaonei.com was literally a Facebook clone when it started, sporting the same shade of blue and the same layout. ReadWriteWeb guest writer Gang Lu wrote on this blog in June 2008 that Xiaonei.com "was like a simplified version of Facebook in Chinese when it was first launched." He noted that it had "the same layout, same color scheme and even a very similar logo," which he said "made people wonder if there was an official connection with Facebook."

Kaixin001.com is another very popular social network. Kaiser said that its users are mostly "white collar middle class" and typically come from a "first tier city."

Kaiser noted that Kaixin001.com is extremely popular among people who work for multinational companies, ad agencies and other white collar companies. Accordingly, the site is valuable because of its relatively wealthy user base.

The third social network that is very popular in China is 51.com, which Kaiser said is mostly used by people who live in "lower tier cities" and even rural areas. He noted that it has a "lower brow offering."

Each of these three hugely popular social networks in China has its own niche; from the mainstream Renren, to the more prestigious Kaixin001, to the populist 51.com.

In our next post in this series, we check out China's Twitter clones.

However in countries where democracy doesn't prevail, the read/write Web is often subject to censorship rules.

According to Wikipedia, Internet censorship in China is "conducted under a wide variety of laws and administrative regulations." In particular China looks to censor political or social content. In mid-2009 a number of prominent Western social networking sites were blocked in China, including Facebook and Twitter. Western media speculated that the bans were put in place to prevent activists from using social networks to organize themselves - which happened in Iran in June of 2009, when Iranian election protesters used Twitter to call attention to their cause.

Self-censorship

Inside China, self-censorship is practiced by many web publishers in order to prevent trouble. "Self-censorship is the rule of survival that prevents popular websites from being shut down," said veteran web developer Zoe Wang in The Global Times.

However, self-censorship is difficult to do in practice - because it's not regulated by a single authority and so there are a lack of clear rules on what to censor. Web publishers in China are never sure what could get their site shut down.

On sites driven by user-generated content, publishers routinely censor political content. But while this may appease the government, it risks upsetting the core users. This has been the case on Douban, a popular social network in China with 33 million registered users. Censorship has recently tightened on Douban, leading to "veteran members" protesting about the censorship of certain photos, poetry and book reviews.

Site Closures, Including RWW China

The Golbal Times points to three recent examples of sites closed down by authorities: Fanfou, Yeeyan and Blogbus. The latter two were recovered in January.

These site closures directly affected our own company, as Yeeyan is our syndication partner for ReadWriteWeb China.

Yeeyan is a community translation website (our initial review 3 years ago), which publishes some well-known Western news sites such as The Guardian, Time Magazine, the New York Times and of course ReadWriteWeb. In early December, Yeeyan was forced to shut down its site - including ReadWriteWeb China.

At the time of the closure, the following message was posted to the Yeeyan homepage by the Yeeyan team:

"Due to our errors in handling some of the articles on the website, we went against the relevant regulations; therefore Yeeyan has to temporarily shut off its server, and adjust the relevant content."

Ethan Zuckerman from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School concluded that "at least one of the authorities that control the Chinese internet - which include the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology - found the prospect of frequent, high-quality translation of US and European media [from Yeeyan] threatening."

Yeeyan re-opened in January (using .org instead of .com) and we're certainly very pleased to see that ReadWriteWeb China is back as a result.

Free the read/write Web!

There's no shortage of rhetoric from the West about why China should cease censorship of the Web. Indeed Google made a brave move earlier this year by threatening to pull out of China if it continued to have to censor search results. While there has been no resolution in the Google-China case as yet, at least the issue is being highlighted and challenged by companies of Google's stature in 2010.

I hope that ReadWriteWeb's participation in the March 15 event at the Paley Center in New York City, where I will be discussing these and other issues alongside prominent Chinese activist Ai Weiwei and Twitter's Jack Dorsey, does its bit to help encourage China to remove censorship on the Web.

Bookmark our special Weiwei webpage to track the latest buzz about the March 15 event and view a video about Ai Weiwei's art and digital activism.

The topic of the event is the emergence of digital activism for fostering positive social change. The onsite event is invitation only, but it will be live streamed exclusively on ReadWriteWeb on Monday, March 15, at 6:30 PM EST (-5 GMT), from the Paley Center for Media, New York City.

You can start the discussion about it now on Twitter, using the hashtag #aiweiwei. We would also love to hear your thoughts on the topic via the comments here on ReadWriteWeb. To this end, shortly we will launch a special webpage that aggregates media and real-time conversation leading up to this event.

Ai Weiwei and Digital Activism in China

ReadWriteWeb has been actively covering events in China this year, in particular Google's struggle to effect change regarding censorship in China. So I'm personally thrilled to join the conversation with these three smart and influential people: Ai Weiwei, Jack Dorsey and Orville Schell.

Ai Weiwei is undoubtedly the star attraction. He is China's leading digital activist and a pioneer in the use of blogging and Twitter in China. He's also a renown international artist and architect. In the early 2000s, he collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron on the famous "Bird's Nest" design of the National Stadium for the Beijing Olympics. Ai Weiwei later renounced that design as a "pretend smile" from the Chinese government.

Here is a video that explains more about Ai Weiwei's art and digital activism:

Further Details About the Event

This historic event will be streamed live from the prestigious Paley Center for Media in New York City, enabling an audience of thousands around the world to view and listen - as well as participate in the discussion. The live conversation on stage will be shaped in part by the digital commentary around it, which itself is part of the ongoing global conversation about social media and social change.

ReadWriteWeb is driving much of the online component of this event. Stay tuned for more details on that next week.

Date: Monday, March 15, 2010

Time: 6:30 - 8 p.m. Eastern Time, (-5 GMT)

Venue: Paley Center for Media
25 E. 52nd Street
New York, NY 10019-6129

Details About the Participants

This information comes from the Paley Center website:

Ai Weiwei is a conceptual artist, curator, architect, social commentator, and activist. He was born in 1957 into the domestic political exile of his father, the noted modernist poet Ai Qing. Ai Weiwei's birthright was simultaneously one of a cultural insider and a political outsider, and he quickly perceived the contradictions of his condition.

Ai Weiwei's art has been shown in museums and galleries internationally. As a curator, he is known for cutting-edge exhibitions. In the early 2000s, he collaborated with the acclaimed Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the winning design for the National Stadium project for the Beijing Olympics, popularly known as the "Bird's Nest," which he later renounced as a "pretend smile."

Ai Weiwei has never sought foreign citizenship and maintains his credibility among a devoted Chinese following as a highly active blogger, with his finger on the pulse of modern China. Unafraid to spotlight injustices, he has documented the arbitrary conviction and swift execution of alleged cop-killer Yang Jia in Shanghai, investigated shoddy school construction in Sichuan, and led a movement to oppose the nationwide installation of Internet filtering software in new computers. He is critical of one-party rule and government corruption, as well as the nationalist tendencies of China's citizenry, which allow state power to go unchecked. As a result his blogs are shut down, his home studio is under surveillance, and he's had to have cranial surgery for injuries sustained during a recent altercation with local police in Sichuan.

Jack Dorsey is the creator, cofounder, and chairman of Twitter, Inc. Originally from St. Louis, Jack's early fascination for mass-transit and how cities function led him to Manhattan and programming real-time messaging systems for couriers, taxis, and emergency vehicles. Throughout this work Jack witnessed thousands of workers in the field constantly updating where they were and what they were doing; Twitter is a constrained simplification designed for general usage and extended by the millions of people who make it their own every day. Jack is dedicated to creating public goods which foster approachability, immediacy, and transparency, and is starting a second company named Square focused on bringing these concepts to commerce.

Richard MacManus is the founder and editor in chief of ReadWriteWeb, one of the most popular and influential technology blogs in the world. New Zealander MacManus founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003 and grew his blog about the evolving Internet into an international team of journalists. ReadWriteWeb is read by millions of thought leaders and consumers, and is syndicated daily by the New York Times.

From the early days of blogging, social networks and YouTube to the future of machine learning, aggregate data analysis and other meta-trends, MacManus is widely recognized as a leader in articulating what's next in technology and what it means for society at large.

Orville Schell is the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. He has written fourteen books, including nine on China, and is at work on an interpretation of the last one-hundred years of Chinese history. He was a Fellow at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Harvard-Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism. Prior to assuming his position at Asia Society, he served as Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

This sort of ruling attacks the foundation of the Internet as we use it today.

In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police ... a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees --David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it was removed.

Reuters reports that the three executives were sentenced to six months in jail. The ruling sets a very dangerous precedence. As we wrote earlier this month, "Nicola D'Angelo, a commissioner in Italy's Communications Authority, say these new rules would make Italy 'the only Western country in which it is necessary to have prior government permission to operate this kind of service.'"

The simple fact is that users should be solely responsible for the content they create, as long as the publishing entity takes reasonable steps to ensure that laws are followed within a timely manner. Had Google allowed to sit on the website in defiance of the laws, then we would be having a different discussion.

As Google argues in its blog post, "If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them -- every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video -- then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear."

Google says it will "vigorously appeal this decision", a move we strongly back. But we have to wonder why it won't take this same sort of stance in China, where it has threatened, but still has yet to remove censorship on its search results.

Just as the argument here is that people need to be allowed to create, and websites allowed to host, content, people need to be able to access that content. Freedom consists not only of the ability to express opinions, however disparate, but to access those opinions.

So, in reference to standing up to Italy, we say an enthusiastic "here, here!" and only hope to see the same, instead of idle threats, in the company's dealings with China.

It's now over 6 weeks since Google's original blog post, but there are no signs that the company has stopped censoring its search results in China - let alone shut down Google.cn.

Immediately after Google's post, reports circulated that the Chinese government was behind the attacks on Google and over 30 other companies. Security company Verisign iDefense claimed that the attacks came from either agents of the Chinese state, or those acting on their behalf.

According to a podcast from veteran East Asia correspondent for The World, Mary Kay Magistad, Google appeared to unblock search terms and content after their announcement - at least for a short time. She said that search results seemed unfiltered for about 3 hours and then "came and went" in an intermittent way, which she thought was because "China's censors scrambled to keep up with Google changing the game."

Despite Magistad's report, Google said on January 14 that Google.cn was still censoring its results to comply with China's law and protect its employees there.

A New York Times report came out on January 18, claiming that "at least two foreign journalists living in Beijing have had their Google e-mail accounts hacked". The Times also noted that several human rights advocates in China had their Gmail accounts compromised. Among those was Ai Weiwei, an artist and prominent blogger in China.

China Attacks "Irresponsible" Accusations

Despite so much media attention in the West, on February 9 we wrote that Google had not made any moves to withdraw its Chinese search operations. What's more, censored results were still appearing on Google's Chinese portal, Google.cn.

This week, Western media reported that U.S. authorities had tracked down the hacker who wrote the code behind the attacks on Google last month. However, he was not blamed for launching the attacks. The man was said to be a freelance security consultant with ties to the Chinese government and military.

These latest reports appear to have angered the Chinese government. According to Chinese news site Xinhua, China has denied government links to cyber attacks against Google. Xinhua quotes China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang as saying that the various accusations against China were "irresponsible and calculating." The interpretation was slightly different in China Daily, which translated Qin Gang as saying that the accusations against China were "irresponsible and have ulterior motives."

In an editorial, Xinhua editor Mu Xuequan adds, "The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and some other newspapers have published articles indicating that cyber attacks targeting Google and several other U.S. companies were from China. Such allegations are arbitrary and biased."

According to the Wall St. Journal, Google is about to "resume discussions" with the Chinese government.

Conclusion: Google Isn't Winning This Battle

The upshot is that Google has actually done very little since its announcement on January 12. It may have modified the censor settings for a few days, but they've been complying with the Chinese government ever since. Talks are resuming, but despite Google CEO Eric Schmidt's claims that it will "apply some pressure" to China, it doesn't seem likely that the Chinese government will back down.

Will Google need to eat some humble pie and continue the status quo of a censored search engine in China? Schmidt's comments over the past month indicate that Google doesn't want to leave China, so that's the probable scenario - despite all of its big talk in January.

The man is a freelance security consultant with ties to the Chinese government and military. The Chinese government had access to his work, although the man stated he "would rather not have uniformed guys looking over his shoulder, but there is no way anyone of his skill level can get away from that kind of thing," according to one analyst.

The spyware's launch was traced to computers at Shanghai Jiaotong University and Lanxiang Vocational School, the first of which counts former government cybersecurity experts among its staff. Both institutions have denied involvement in the attacks.

As U.S. officials continue their investigation, cybersecurity folks and others familiar with the situation wonder at how this series of attacks positions China in the international sphere. Does this news signal the beginning of a new East v. West cold war? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

However, perhaps authoritarian governments shouldn't block social media - it may actually be helpful to them!

Morozov noted that in the Iran Twitter protests of June of 2009, services such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs were actually operational and being used by activists. According to Morozov, this was great for the Iranian government - as it enabled them to "gather open source intelligence." The government could identify how Iranian activists connect to each other, by looking at their Facebook pages or Twitter connections.

Kaiser Kuo commented in yesterday's post about the same issue in China:

"...it's astonishing how cavalier some critics of the CCP [China Communist Party] are on Twitter, making no effort to disguise their identities, making their network of friends totally transparent (you can use any of a number of Twitter tools to see the extent of interconnectedness, friend overlap, number of @ messages back and forth, etc) and leaving a completely searchable history. Anyone with a serious anti-CCP agenda would be an idiot to use Twitter."

Also worth noting: Morozov said in his TED talk that cyber-activism may be offset by what he termed "cyber-hedonism." He claimed that people are becoming passive due to the Internet. He said that we often assume that the Internet is going to be the catalyst of change, but it may actually be "the new opium for the masses."

Morozov's theories were challenged in the comments to that TED video. One commenter claimed that "we focus on the obvious totalitarian regimes while our so called democracies use propaganda on a daily basis."

Regardless, Morozov raises some very valid points. While the Web promotes freedom of expression, at the same time it enables authoritarian regimes to monitor their citizens and identify troublemakers.

Let us know your thoughts on this in the comments.

Photo: harrystaab

But does the Chinese government really care about Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as much as we in the west think they do?

• Joel: China "will restrict the foreign original and support a more easily regulated domestic alternative."
• Gabriela: "While it is true that there are Chinese alternatives, those sites are not nearly as open."
• key: "China govt blocks websites not according to their popularity, but to their degree of freedom."

One of the breakthrough moments for Twitter came in June 2009, when people in Iran used Twitter to protest the country's election results. This gave Twitter a lot of exposure in western mainstream media. But more than that, other countries where democracy is tenuous sat up and took notice.

The Chinese government started to view social media services as a way for "subversive" citizens to cause trouble. The New York Times recently reported that a January 24 editorial in People's Daily, the Communist Party of China's official newspaper, blamed "online warfare launched by America, via YouTube video and Twitter micro-blogging" for sowing discord amongst the Iranian people. China currently blocks prominent U.S. social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

However, it's arguable how important those services are to Chinese citizens. As digital consultant Wei Wang guest blogged on ReadWriteWeb in November, "every social media category has a Chinese equivalent that is tuned to the particular needs of the mainland Chinese market."

Kaiser Kuo, a leading commentator about the Chinese Internet market, gave us further context in a comment on an August 2009 article on ReadWriteWeb:

"Yes, there are some Chinese who use Facebook, Twitter, and other social media services that have been blocked in China. But the overwhelming majority of people interested in SNS will use, say, QQZone, or Xiaonei (recently rebranded Renren), or the very popular SNS Kaixin001, or 51.com. Youtube is blocked, but long before that Youtube was a distant also-ran in the Internet video race, far behind sites like Youku.com and Tudou.com. Microblogging sites like Jiwai.de, Fanfou, and Zuosa -- all of which, lamentably, are now out of service in the aftermath of Urumqi -- all boast(ed) user numbers that dwarf the number of Twitter users in China."

It's clear that the Chinese government really is threatened by the rise of social media, because those services give citizens a voice in media - and that voice can potentially reach a global audience.

But let's be realistic: how much of a threat to freedom of speech is banning Twitter in a country where other types of social media are much more popular anyway.

What do you think - are we in the West making too much of an issue of China banning Twitter, Facebook and similar social media sites? Just because they're popular with us, doesn't mean they're as popular (and therefore dangerous) in a country like China. Are we over-reacting to the Chinese government's moves against U.S. social media?

Because the attacks were focused on gaining access to the email accounts of human rights activists, Google received a lot of praise for taking a stand against the Chinese government, the alleged perpetrators of the hacking attempts. However, only nine days later, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt took a softer tone during the company's fourth quarter earnings call. "We wish to remain in China," he said. "We like the Chinese people, we like our Chinese employees, we like the business opportunities there."

Google to Invest in Chinese Media Company

Google does like the businesses there, apparently. It's a month later and the company seems to be no closer to shutting down their Chinese search operations business than they were back in January. In addition, anonymous sources say Google is planning to invest in China's largest in-bus digital media and advertising company, an outfit called Bus Online whose revenue was about 314.5 million yuan ($46.07 million) last year. A consortium led by Walt Disney Co. is reportedly in advanced talks with the Chinese company and has plans to buy a 30%-40% stake for more than $100 million in shares, both public and private. Google is said to be among the investors.

This move, if it happens, would lead credence to the argument put forth in January which had cynics claiming that Google's withdrawal from China had less to do with their so-called "moral high grounds" propped up by the company motto "don't be evil," and had more to do with the fact that Google's Chinese search business simply couldn't compete with the more popular Chinese engine baidu.com.

Hacker Crack Down Could Help

The reality of the situation may be a bit more murky than a simple case of "good" versus "evil," though. Of course Google couldn't sit idly by as the Chinese government directed attacks on its infrastructure, but it also would be bad business to ignore the massive potential of the Chinese Internet market.

Yesterday, new reports from Chinaview.cn stated that the Chinese government had shut down the nation's largest website responsible for training hackers. The implication of this news - and especially its timing, given the actual shut down occurred in November - is that the Chinese government wants to appear as if they're "playing nice" with regards to Western interests. That move may be precisely the sort of thing Google needs in order to maintain an appearance of concern regarding the cyber attack situation while also not making a regrettable, revenue-impacting business decision by ceasing Chinese operations altogether. The only question now is whether or not the public will forgive Google for doing so.

Three people were arrested and the equivalent of a quarter of a million dollars in assets frozen. The accused, who ran a now-shuttered site called Black Hawk Safety Net, are suspected of offering online attacking programs, disseminating viruses and recruiting almost 200,000 members. Police have confiscated nine servers and five computers and completely closed all associated websites.

According to China Daily's police sources, Black Hawk Safety Net was the subject of research and scrutiny from a team of around 50 police officers ever since 2007, when suspected hackers in another attack were found to be members of the site.

There is no word yet as to whether this site or its members or owners were affiliated with the recent attacks on Google accounts and other international entities. To read more related news, check out our ever-growing archives on China's Internet exploits.