[Infowarrior] - OpEd: Propaganda.com

[Richard Forno]

Propaganda.com
By EVGENY MOROZOV
Published: March 29, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/opinion/30iht-edmorozov.html

This year’s report on “enemies of the Internet” prepared by Reporters  
Without Borders, the international press advocacy group, paints a very  
gloomy picture for the freedom of expression on the Web. It finds that  
many governments have stepped up their attacks on the Internet,  
harassing bloggers and making it harder to express dissenting opinions  
online.

These are very disturbing trends. But identifying “Internet enemies”  
only on the basis of censorship and intimidation, as Reporters Without  
Borders has done, obfuscates the fact that these are only two  
components of a more comprehensive and multi-pronged approach that  
authoritarian governments have developed to diffuse the subversive  
potential of online communications.

Many of these governments have honed their Internet strategies beyond  
censorship and are employing more subtle (and harder to detect) ways  
of controlling dissent, often by planting their own messages on the  
Web and presenting them as independent opinion.

Their actions are often informed by the art of online “astroturfing,”  
a technique also popular with modern corporations and PR firms. While  
companies use it to engineer buzz around products and events,  
governments are using it to create the appearance of broad popular  
support for their ideology.

Their ultimate ambition may be to transform the Internet into a  
“spinternet,” the vast and mostly anonymous areas of cyberspace under  
indirect government jurisdiction. The spinternet strategy could be  
more effective than censorship — while there are a plenty of ways to  
access blocked Web sites, we do not yet have the means to distinguish  
spin from independent comment.

In China, the spinternet is being built by the “50 cent party,” a  
loose online squad of tech-savvy operators loyal to the government who  
are paid to troll the Internet, find dissenting views and leave  
anonymous comments to steer all discussions in more “harmonious”  
directions. The “50 cents” in the name stands for their meager pay  
rates.

Plenty of local technology companies are also eager to help the  
government with various data-mining programs that identify dissenting  
views early and dispatch “50 cent party” operators to steer the  
discussion away from an antigovernment direction.

In Iran, the Revolutionary Guards recently announced their ambition to  
build their own spinternet by launching 10,000 blogs for the Basij, a  
paramilitary force under the Guards. This comes at a time when the  
Internet has become a major force in exposing corruption in the  
highest ranks of the Iranian leadership.

The Russian government may have found an even more ingenious way of  
suppressing the Internet’s democratizing potential: cost. Many  
Internet users in Russia are still billed on the basis of the  
frequency and duration of their browsing sessions, and the state-owned  
All-Russia State Television and Radio Company has floated the idea of  
building a “social Internet,” where users would pay nothing for state- 
approved Web sites.

Such an approach is already being tested in Belarus, where Internet  
users can browse the government’s favored mouthpiece, “Belarus Today,”  
for free — that is, without paying their ISPs for Internet traffic, as  
they must for the country’s few independent media outlets.

The rise of the spinternet suggests that the threats that the Internet  
poses to authoritarian regimes are far from unambiguous; some of these  
governments have turned quite adept at exploiting it for their own  
purposes.

So while it’s important to continue documenting the direct repression  
of online journalists and bloggers, as organizations like Reporters  
Without Borders are doing, it is important to remember that there are  
other ways to qualify as an “enemy of the Internet.”