Radio interviews: social networks and cyber democracy

I was invited by the national radio to discuss social media (with Yan Luong) and cyber democracy (with Jean-Christophe Schwaab). Both interviews are in French:

Comment les réseaux changent l’info
Des sites internet proposent une information à la carte, basée sur les flux des réseaux sociaux. Une alternative aux médias “traditionnels”? Ceux-ci veulent investir les réseaux, mais la concurrence est rude…

Avec Yann Luong, responsable des relations en ligne pour la RTS, Laurent Haug, fondateur des Conférences Lift sur les implications sociales des changements technologiques, et Sylvain Lafrance, vice-président de Radio-Canada.

MP3

Forum: Sécurité informatique
Elle y a travaillé pendant près de trois ans et demi, la Chancellerie fédérale a enfin sorti son rapport sur la cyberdémocratie et la cyberparticipation. Un document de 40 pages sensé donner au Conseil fédéral une vision claire de l’Internet d’aujourd’hui et l’aider à utiliser, à prendre en compte les outils web d’aujourd’hui. L’analyse de Magali Philip. Débat avec Jean-Christophe Schwab, secrétaire central USS député socialiste vaudois et Laurent Haug, fondateur des conférences LIFT.

MP3

Technologies increase the “cost of repression”

I have been thinking a lot about the true role of technologies in the recent political movements in Northern Africa. I feel right now it is wise to wait a bit while the facts are gathered.

I am panicked when I see pretty serious magazines making simplifications like “the Facebook group « We are all Khaled Saïd » has 500 000 members, 10 % of Egypt’s internet users“.

How do you know these 500’000 members are all from Egypt? A recent research on Twitter users active during the revolution showed only 0.027% of users were identifying their location as Egypt, Yemen or Tunisia. Smart users from those countries “likely do not provide their location information to protect their identities”, but it still hints that the massive amount of traction social media gave to these phenomena was very likely coming from outside of these countries.

As I said, let’s wait before hurrying up to conclusions as NOBODY knows right now if the protesters gathered because of Facebook, Al Jazeera, SMS, word to mouth, or something else. We will probably never know for sure.

Trying to find a relevant and neutral point of view, I came across this article from Marc Saint-Upéry on the Russian International News Agency, making a key point: new communication raise considerably the cost of repression.

The new electronic media do not miraculously abolish the laws of the political universe. They create new synergies, but they do not invent or recombine at will the arsenal of social protest. The young Egyptian cyberactivists knew that. [...] They also knew that “something was in the air,” as blogger Hossama Halawy, a consummate interpreter of Egyptian street life, had already written back in October. “No one knows when the explosion is going to happen, but it seems everyone I meet or bump into today feels it’s inevitable,” reads one of his posts. [...]

Since 2004, there was a growing number of social protests. Blue-collar workers, doctors, lawyers, judges, slum residents and even real estate tax collectors would stage a sit-in in front of their workplace or any significant institution and call the desks of private newspapers such as Al Masri al Youm, Al Shuruk or Al Dustur. Photographs and reporters would be sent and, the day after, the protesters were often invited to a talk-show seen by millions of Egyptians.

That’s also how police brutality could become part of the show. New communication technologies don’t build social movements out of thin air, but they do raise considerably the cost of repression by enhancing its visibility.

Link

Search neutrality

Another kind of neutrality I was not aware of: Search neutrality, i.e. forcing search engines to remain objective and neutral in the results they provide. It is a complex and highly subjective issue, but Google has a huge leverage on millions of websites, and the company is now being investigated by the European union on whether it abused its dominant position.

The problem with search neutrality? By definition, search engines are subjective, they filter some sites in, other sites out. “Telling a search engine to be more relevant is like telling a boxer to punch harder [...] Search is an inherently subjective enterprise that makes a mockery of attempts to regulate it into some sort of neutral form” says James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at the New York Law School, on Ars Technica.

A recent attempt to find a biais in Google resulted in Search Engine Watch (a reference on the matter) concluding that there is little to no biais, and that other engines might be even worse.

What we see here might be more of a cultural clash, the “business centric” americans finding it normal that a large company provides a highly influential service, while Europeans have a more centralized approach and get scared when lots of power is between the hands of somebody else than a government. Liberalism vs socialism, if I’m allowed a simplification that George W. Bush could have fathered (sorry).

Regulating search will be extremely complicated, and users certainly don’t want a government to be able to weight on what search engines return either (which would be the other extreme). I wonder what would happen if Google was founded by Europeans and operating from France or Germany. How different would the algorythm be, and would Google still inspire fear to the Sarkozys and Merkels of this world? Where is Quaero when you need it ;) ?

PS: Another example of EU vs Google, the spanish government asking Google to take down some links and grant a right for forget to its citizens.
PS2: More on the matter: Is Google Favoring Itself In Its Search Results?

Social media, democracy and dictatorship

Many questions raised by this Evgeny Morozov’s article who goes beyond the usual “the web is making democracy inevitable” tune. Social networks can be used by protesters around the world, but once governments pass the door they become a source of information on dissidents, with potentially dramatic consequences:

But that isn’t what happened in Belarus. After the first flash mob, the authorities began monitoring By_mob, the LiveJournal community where the activities were announced. The police started to show up at the events, often before the flashmobbers did. Not only did they detain participants, but they too took photos. These—along with the protesters’ own online images—were used to identify troublemakers, many of whom were then interrogated by the KGB, threatened with suspension from university, or worse. […] Social media created a digital panopticon that thwarted the revolution: its networks, transmitting public fear, were infiltrated and hopelessly outgunned by the power of the state.

Controlling your privacy on social networks is quite complicated – mostly because it goes against the fundamental needs of advertising, and is therefore not encouraged. Bad privacy management can have consequences:

Social networking, then, has inadvertently made it easier to gather intelligence about activist networks. Even a tiny security flaw in the settings of one Facebook profile can compromise the security of many others. A study by two MIT students, reported in September, showed it is possible to predict a person’s sexual orientation by analysing their Facebook friends; bad news for those in regions where homosexuality carries the threat of beatings and prison.

But everthing’s not lost:

[...] the internet can if used properly give dissidents secure and cheap tools of communication. Russian activists can use hard-to-tap Skype in place of insecure phone lines, for example. Dissidents can encrypt emails, distribute anti-government materials without leaving a paper trail, and use clever tools to bypass internet filters. [...] Second, new technology makes bloody crackdowns riskier, as police are surrounded by digital cameras and pictures can quickly be sent to western news agencies. Some governments, like Burma and North Korea, don’t care about looking brutal, but many others do. Third, technology reduces the marginal cost of protest, helping to turn “fence-sitters” into protesters at critical moments. An apolitical Iranian student, for instance, might find that all her Facebook friends are protesting and decide to take part.

Conclusion: social medias are, like all innovations, a double edged sword:

Yet while the internet may take the power away from an authoritarian (or any other) state or institution, that power is not necessarily transferred to pro-democracy groups. Instead it often flows to groups who, if anything, are nastier than the regime. Social media’s greatest assets—anonymity, “virality,” interconnectedness—are also its main weaknesses.

Link (via Bruce again)

The problem with Democracy

Well, the situation is not as bad as it was a couple of months ago. This time we got lucky, and seem to have ended up on the right side of the vote. But I think our democratic systems has an increasing number of flaws that will need to be addressed in the near future. What are these issues?

• All voters have the same weight
  Let’s make a parallel with Wikipedia here. I already wrote that giving all users the same power was not right. Wikipedia seems to get ready to do something about it, and we need the same process to happen in society. The big question is of course how? How to reward someone who read all the political programs with care vs someone who is just voting based on (partisan) TV ads? How to detect the “relevant” citizens, and how do we define relevancy? One idea would be to give all newborn a points capital, that can increase in a very restricted number of cases, and decrease following a predetermined scale. A bit like driving license in France.
  Let’s say we get ten points at birth. The vote will count for ten unless a person is found guilty of a crime. At the opposite, voting often or getting elected (i.e. showing commitment to the democratic system) increases the weight of one’s vote. Being a mayor gives one hundred points, a deputy one thousand. Being the president gives a million points as that person knows how the system is working, has headed it for several years. It simply makes sense that his or her vote counts more than the street guy who doesn’t care about politics and votes because a candidate “looks nice”.
• Democracy is built around (increasingly) irrelevant boundaries
  I have lived in Switzerland for almost 15 years now, which means I left France that same number of years ago. Why is it I can’t vote in Switzerland, and can in France? What qualifies me to make a decision that will impact the French daily life, something I do not experience. Why can I vote and don’t have to go through the consequences of my vote? At the opposite, why can’t I participate in the elections that affect me directly? National borders are, slowly but surely, becoming totally irrelevant, heritages of a past way of life that is disappearing. Populations are moving around, cultures get mixed, distances are abolished by technology. We need to find a better way to connect citizens with their zone of relevancy. Why not come up with a system that counts the number of days spent in a country? If I split my time between two countries, why can’t I get half a vote in each for example?
  Another boundary that should be questionned is age. In today’s society, with such a major shift (the web) happening two decades ago, it might be arguable that a 16 years old could give a more informed vote than a 80 years old. Not because he is smarter, but because he probably understands the challenges and the possibilities of society much better than someone who has never had to send an email in his life. There is no easy solution here, but it’s worth thinking about it.
• Democracy is too manichean
  We always need a winner and a loser. But is that what really reflects the reality when you have a country voting 51% for a candidate, 49% for another? Why not come up with a better working system, one that allows for two persons with contradictory opinions to work together? The boundaries between political parties are getting challenged in France (Sarkozy hired socialists in his government) and in the US. But why not find a way to embed that concept into the system directly? Didn’t we all dream of having Al Gore involved in some way after the 2000 election? Should he be silenced because he had a few hundred votes less than the other guy? Why are these few votes ending up counting more than the millions of people who were rooting for him?
• Too many people don’t vote
  This one probably has some solutions thanks to technologies. There is a need to find a way to have voting follow the new ways of life. You should be able to vote while on a trip, or at the hospital, or while working. It is already possible but still too complicated (because mostly paper based). There is a need for a more direct link between voting and voters.
  I also believe there is an issue with reporting here. We don’t have enough feedback on the result of our votes. Obama seems to want to change that (think weekly YouTube address, websites dedicated to more transparency) and it is a welcomed development. But an effort should be made to give voters the impression their vote make a difference – good or bad. I used to work at the UN on financial reporting systems, and noticed that more transparency create more involvement. There is an opportunity here to lure those who deserted the democratic system back into the picture.

Please do not walk on the water

The Telegraph’s Matt Pritchett nailed it in his November 5 cartoon:

A picture is worth as many words as you know ;)

Politics is cool again

After a world where politicians were arrogant and distant figures, and thanks to the likes of Obama, Blair, Clinton or Sarkozy, politics are back on the list of desirable careers.

I grew up in a world where leaders were political animals, cut from the people, an unreachable little family with its own dirty secrets and methods. For many it was impossible to relate to those men, a different social class, locking power as much as it could, making sure nobody could interfere with the system in place.

The view of politics in the France of the 90s and 00s was summarized at the café du commerce with a simple formula: all crooks! A plotting elite was running the country for its own advantage, disregarding public’s interest in the process.

Then something happened. Politicians became younger, smarter. They restarted to talk about dreams, brought some values and ideals to the debate. Glorified by television, dressed (and hair-dressed ;) to shine, they began to use new technologies to become more intimate with the masses, sharing the inside stories of their daily life, that meeting with the Dalai Lama, that VIP seat at the Olympics’ opening ceremony.

And suddenly politics became cool again. Even the younger generation stood up and “rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy“. Amazing what you can do with inspiration, leadership, and the right technologies.

^{A picture from Obama’s Flickr stream. Technology made him feel closer to the people than any other politician.}

Another question worth pondering: is this happening by chance? Or is Obama the symptom of a more profound change, where politics are undergoing the same changes than, say, “knowledge”, when a certain online encyclopedia established the power of the masses over the one of the elite?

What is sure is that the needed changes will require millions of souls driven by a common vision. The world will have to function more like Wikipedia – “if something is broken, fix it!”, with masses of citizen getting together to better a situation that a small elite can not overcome alone. For that we need inspiration. While many question Obama’s ability to lead the American political machine, we should not overlook the power of inspiration. “Vision without implementation is hallucination” said Benjamin Franklin. And Obama’s biggest contribution might be that he made millions of people believe in the democratic system again, thus enabling the implementation of the changes we badly need.

I am sure that kids are again looking up to the president-elect, thinking to themselves “that’s the job I want to do in the future”. And Obama didn’t even need the supermodel wife to achieve that. He’s that good ;)

Bonus links (thx Steve):

NYT Op-Ed: A Date With Scarcity
“Nov. 4, 2008, is a historic day because it marks the end of an economic era, a political era and a generational era all at once.
Economically, it marks the end of the Long Boom, which began in 1983. Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance, which began in 1980. Generationally, it marks the end of baby boomer supremacy, which began in 1968. For the past 16 years, baby boomers, who were formed by the tumult of the 1960s, occupied the White House. By Tuesday night, if the polls are to be believed, a member of a new generation will become president-elect.
So today is not only a pivot, but a confluence of pivots”

Salon: An open apology to boomers everywhere
But when we watched Barack Obama’s victory speech on Tuesday night, we looked into the eyes of a real leader, and decades of cynicism about politics and grass-roots movements and community melted away in a single moment. We heard the voice of a man who can inspire with his words, who’s unashamed of his own intelligence, who’s willing to treat the citizens of this country like smart, capable people, worthy of respect. For the first time in some of our lifetimes, we believed.