This afternoon I had the pleasure to listen to Ethan Zuckermann’s presentation on the “Cute Cat Theory of Web Activism”, which opened my eyes to a side of Web 2.0 technologies I’d never seen before. Ethan started his presentation with this thesis:

Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists.

If there is no porn, the tool does not work.

If there are no activists, it doesn’t work well.

Before Ethan could make any headway into explaining this thesis, he stated that “Porn tells you if your tool is working!”. Right as he said that he realized what he’d said and the audience erupted into laughter. Oh, the truth in that statement!

But, all joking aside, his point is valid. Ethan shared a story from his days at Tripod (back in the early web 1.0 days) when a term that no one at Tripod understood started appearing on sites on tripod.com. A trip to the local university’s political science department cleared up the mystery: Malaysians were using Tripod to spread the word on political reform in Malaysia. Its been commonly accepted that new technology is first embraced to deliver porn to the masses and Ethan suggests that political activism is only one step behind porn.

Another example along the same lines is the president of Tunisia. Fearing an assassination, the president hasn’t left Tunisia in years, yet Tunisian’s on the net are using plane spotting sites to track the movement of the presidents plane around the world. If the president hasn’t left Tunisia, what is his plane doing all over Europe? Or is it true that the president doesn’t leave? Plane spotters around the world are inadvertently helping people around the world bring a small amount of government transparency to governments renowned for their opacity.

Next, Ethan outlined the basic forms of Web censorship:

  • Block keywords — filtering traffic based on keywords in the content. This is difficult and very expensive, yet China does this.
  • Block URLs — works better and is still expensive, but not foolproof. For instance, its possible to access the same YouTube video using a number of different URL schemes. Blocking them all effectively requires a lot of insight into the service being blocked.
  • Block DNS — ineffective. Blocks lots of people, but the people who persist to find the content via an IP address have no difficulty finding it. The recent Wikilinks case gives a perfect example of this not working.
  • Block IPs — overly broad. Blocking IPs blocks entire services, even if only a small fragment of the service is objectionable.

New to this lineup is event based filtering — for instance, Iran is threatening to shut down the Internet during the next election. To see who else is censoring the Internet, see OpenNet’s Censorship Map.

The next example comes from Bahrain where the government is extremely tight lipped about who owns what land. There Google Maps caused a stir when it allowed Bahrainians to see how the royalty lived by examining satellite maps. When Google Maps was blocked, people started passing around PDF files of the images to circumvent the blockage.

The point? If you have a committed activist, the only thing you can do is put the activist in jail — nothing else really works to censor people. Egypt employs this strategy with great success and has thrown Alaa, a prominent Egyptian blogger, into jail. Ethan, much like myself, has not seen the purpose of Twitter until Alaa started using Twitter to let his friends know that he is not being held by the Egyptian authorities. Alaa’s supporters are ready to restart a “Free Alaa” campaign should Alaa go missing again — Twitter is his means for checking in and giving off signs of life.

Ethan went on to talk about China and their censorship practices. It turns out that there are more Web 2.0 companies inside China than outside! Rather than letting Chinese citizens use the normal Web 2.0 companies’ services, those sites are blocked. “Harmonized” (read: censored and approved) Chinese versions of the sites exist to bring that functionality to the Chinese people and to keep the censorship alive and well.

So, what does China not block? Apparently there are a number of sites that are too important to the Chinese government to block. GMail, Skype and MMOG’s are not blocked — no one inside China has yet to build an email system that rivals the usefulness of GMail. The government apparently also uses Skype heavily, even though the general public uses its teleconference feature to create ad-hoc pirate radio stations by broadcasting podcasts. I’m stunned — that is brilliant!

So, then how does the title of the talk factor in? Ethan says that the same tools that bring you cute cats on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Blogger are the very same tools that activists use to spread their message. And: “When you block activist video (e.g. YouTube) adorable cats are collateral damage!”

Thanks for the eye opening presentation Ethan — I’ve learned quite a few things about governments who censor their people and that the power of the Internet continues to amaze me.