This past Friday, Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! interviewed journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of The Blogging Revolution. They discussed how many non-Western bloggers have been arrested and suppressed by government institutions of their respective countries just because they pose a threat to the status quo:
Many people in these countries, of course, can’t rely on state-run media, which is propaganda... Blogging is a way of trying to express different views. So in every country I went to, except for Cuba, where the internet is very underdeveloped, you have situations, people blogging about sex, about drugs, about gender issues, about politics. The majority of people in these countries don’t blog politically. They blog about their personal lives, about their boyfriends, their girlfriends. But there is increasingly, as that report states, many, many regimes who are fearful of the fact that you have independent voices, simply put. (Democracy Now!)
What is most troublesome, however, is that Google, Yahoo! and others have actually complied with these governments to achieve the goal of suppressing the coverage bloggers offer:
With the assistance of Western multinationals like Yahoo!, who have actually given information to the regime to assist these people being put in jail. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Cisco, other security firms, internet firms, have sadly and shamefully been involved in these kind of complicity acts. And... one of the things I discuss in the book is to actually have more transparency about how those guys actually operate in those kind of countries. (Democracy Now!)
Google, Microsoft, etc. may be multinational, but they're still US-based companies. One should expect them to uphold in their international dealings certain core rights and values that define the United States: the right to free speech, the right to dissent, and civil disobedience. The fact that Google and Microsoft's market extends to nations whose regimes currently ignore such values and violate such rights doesn't entail that we should tolerate Google and Microsoft's current "when in Rome" attitude. These values and rights aren't bound by time, place and circumstance. They are supposed to apply universally. Hence any compliance with regimes whose interest is to suppress civil disobedience and dissent should be treated for what it is: compromise. Of course, such compromise is unsurprising in a world where market values have come to trump or altogether displace democratic and moral values; where nations, communities, and the people who inhibit them are seen as a mere means to profit rather than invaluable ends in themselves.
UPDATE: Check out this BBC news story about two Burmese bloggers who were arrested within the past year and recently received the 'cyber-dissent award.' Also, check out the Committee to Protect Bloggers. They've got a lot of coverage dealing with bloggers who were arrested for speaking out.
The Suppression of Online Journalism by Nathan M. Blackerby is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
