Month: February 2011

Although many people find things to criticize about Facebook, including its privacy policies, one thing that many users — and many companies that connect to the network’s social graph — like is that the social network requires users to register with their real names. In fact, that’s arguably one of Facebook’s big strengths: it allows you to know who you are connecting to and sharing information with. At the same time, however, that approach makes it difficult for political dissidents in countries such as Egypt to use the network as a tool for organizing protests and other revolutionary purposes, since they don’t want the authorities to be able to track them and their activities. Despite some pressure from social activists, a Facebook official said today that it has no plans to change its policy.

There has been a lot of attention paid recently to the use of social tools such as Twitter and Facebook in uprisings in Tunisia and the more recent popular revolt in Egypt. Although debate continues about how much of an effect these tools have had (a topic we have written about before on a number of occasions) there is no question that activists and revolutionaries in both countries have made use of all the tools at their disposal to organize, including mobile SMS and web-based social networks. While they may not create revolutions where none would otherwise exist, they can certainly help to speed up the process.

To take just one example, Wael Ghonim — the Google staffer who was released Monday after being detained for almost two weeks by the Egyptian government, and who has become a figurehead of the popular movement — has talked about how the Facebook page he helped administer was crucial in building support for the January 25th demonstrations that started the recent uprising. Although he used the name “El Shaheed,” which in Arabic means “the martyr,” the social network has a strict policy against the use of pseudonyms, and some protest-oriented groups in Tunisia and elsewhere have found themselves shut down because of this policy.

While Facebook and other social networks make it easy to spread the word and rally popular support to such causes, however, they also make it easy for government operatives to track activists and dissidents who use such channels to communicate. Although Facebook has taken action to stop outright hacking of the kind the Tunisian government engaged in, there is nothing to stop members of the police or army from simply watching what gets posted to pages about protests, etc. and then following or tracking down those individuals. According to a recent story in the Daily Mail, that’s exactly what government agents have been doing.

Jillian York, who works with the Global Voices Online project — an offshoot of the Harvard Berman Center for the Internet and Society — has been one of those arguing that Facebook should find some way of modifying its policies so that the social network can be used by dissidents in a variety of ways, without the fear of being tracked by their governments and suddenly disappearing the night.

I, for one, would like to see Facebook abandon this policy. It is, for lack of a better word, inane in light of how the platform is used globally. Facebook should listen to their users and accommodate their needs. To me, abandonment of the policy isn’t even that necessary; I just want to see a stop to crackdowns on vulnerable activists.

Simon Axten, of Facebook’s public policy team, told The Register in the UK that the company’s “real name culture” is an essential element of the social network, and that while Facebook is talking to human-rights groups about ways they can use the platform without exposing themselves to government retaliation, the whole point of the social network is to replicate people’s real-world connections online, and having real identities is a key part of doing that. In general, he said, “the benefits of real-name culture outweigh the risks.” So while Facebook makes it easy for you to connect with that old friend from high school, it will also continue to make it easy for governments to track the activities of dissidents as well.

When WikiLeaks exploded into public view last year, with its release of a classified Iraqi war video and then thousands of documents relating to the war in Afghanistan, the response from traditional media outlets — and in particular from the New York Times — was very interesting. Although the Times worked closely with WikiLeaks and its leader Julian Assange in order to get access to and report on the documents, executive editor Bill Keller made it clear that he did not consider Assange a journalist, nor did he think of WikiLeaks as being in any way a journalistic entity. Based on some comments that Keller made at a symposium at Columbia University on Thursday, however, he may be changing his mind.

In his recently released e-book about dealing with WikiLeaks, which was excerpted in the New York Times magazine, the executive editor makes it clear that considered the WikiLeaks founder just a source like any other, not a journalistic colleague, and said that he would “hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism.” In December, Keller seemed to come close to admitting that WikiLeaks might be practising something approaching journalism, when he told a Nieman Foundation event that the organization was doing things in a “more journalistic fashion.” But he added that it still wasn’t “my kind of news organization,” and that if Assange was acting as a journalist in some way, “I don’t regard him as a kindred spirit — he’s not the kind of journalist I am.”

At a symposium yesterday at the Columbia School of Journalism, however — where Keller appeared along with Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger and **, in a panel moderated by Emily Bell of the Tow Center for ** — the Times editor all but acknowledged that WikiLeaks is a journalistic entity, when he said that he did not support the U.S. Department of Justice’s attempts to build a case against Assange under the Espionage Act. According to the Huffington Post’s version of the event, Keller said:

[It would be] hard to conceive of a prosecution of Julian Assange that wouldn’t stretch the law to be applicable to us. Whatever one thinks of Julian Assange… journalists should feel a sense of alarm at any legal action that intends to punish Assange for doing what journalists do.

It’s nice to see that the NYT’s executive editor is — however reluctantly — coming around to the view that we have been arguing for some time: namely, that WikiLeaks is effectively a media entity, and that what it does qualifies as journalism (Columbia’s School of Journalism believes this as well, even if Keller doesn’t yet). It may not be the kind of journalism that the New York Times engages in, but it clearly has a role to play in the expanded media ecosystem. And the fact that WikiLeaks is effectively a stateless entity — the first stateless news organization, as NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has called it — is a crucial part of that role, as media analyst Clay Shirky argues in a recent piece for The Guardian.

Because this tension between governments and leakers is so important, and because WikiLeaks so dramatically helps leakers, it isn’t just a new entrant in the existing media landscape. Its arrival creates a new landscape.

Because WikiLeaks is “headquartered on the web,” as Shirky puts it, no single country or government can shut it down. Even if Assange is eventually prosecuted or removed in some way as the head of the organization, as early supporter and Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir put it recently, “a thousand heads will spring up.” In factm as Shirky notes, that is already happening — Al-Jazeera and The Guardian formed a partnership to release thousands of documents about the relationship between Israel and Palestine (now being called the “Palestine Papers”), and former WikiLeaks staffer Daniel Domscheit-Berg has launched an entity called OpenLeaks. Meanwhile, the New York Times has talked about possibly creating its own digital tip box where sources could leak documents instead of sending them to WikiLeaks.

Whether Bill Keller likes it or not, the tools of journalism have been set loose from the control of entities like the New York Times or The Guardian. Anyone can effectively become a publisher now, and that includes WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks and anyone who makes use of similar tools — just as people who find themselves in the central square in Cairo or the government buildings in Tunisia can behave as journalists if they wish to do so. That’s an important phenomenon, and it would be nice to see the NYT editor come right out and admit that it is happening, rather than dance around the implications.

After weeks of discussion in the blogosphere over whether what happened in Tunisia was a “Twitter revolution,” and whether social media also helped trigger the current anti-government uprising in Egypt, author Malcolm Gladwell — who wrote a widely-read New Yorker article about how inconsequential social media is when it comes to “real” social activism — has finally weighed in with his thoughts on the subject. But he continues to miss the real point about the use of Twitter and Facebook, which is somewhat surprising for the author of the best-seller The Tipping Point.

Although the topic of social media’s role in events in Tunisia and Egypt — and also in Iran and other countries that have recently seen citizen uprisings — has been the focus of much commentary from observers such as Ethan Zuckerman and Jillian York of Global Voices Online, and from foreign affairs writer and author Evgeny Morozov, the response from Gladwell on the New Yorker’s “News Desk” blog was all of about 200 words long. In a somewhat defensive tone, Gladwell suggested that if Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong had made his famous “power springs from the barrel of a gun” statement today, everyone would obsess over whether he made it on Twitter or Facebook. He concluded that while there is a lot that can be said about the protests in Egypt:

Surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.

In other words, as far as the New Yorker writer is concerned, the use of any specific communications tools — whether that happens to be cellphones or SMS or Twitter or Facebook — may be occurring, and may even be helping revolutionaries in countries like Egypt in some poorly-defined way, but it’s just not that interesting. This seems like an odd comment coming from someone who wrote a book all about how a series of small changes in the way people think about an issue can suddenly reach a “tipping point” and gain widespread appeal, since that’s exactly the kind of thing that social media does extremely well.

Gladwell isn’t the only one who has taken a skeptical stance when it comes to the use of social media in such situations. Morozov, who writes for Foreign Policy magazine, is also the author of a book called “Net Delusion,” in which he argues that the views of some “cyber-utopians” are in danger of distorting political discourse, and convincing some politicians and bureaucrats that all people require in order to overthrow governments is Internet access and some Twitter followers (Cory Doctorow critiqued the book recently in The Guardian). This view was echoed in a recent piece in BusinessWeek entitled “The Fallacy of Facebook Diplomacy,” which argued that “the idea that America can use the Internet to influence global events is more dream than reality.”

But as sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci argues in a blog post responding to Gladwell — and as we argued in a recent post here — the point is not that social media tools like Twitter and Facebook cause revolutions in any real sense. What they are very good at doing, however, is connecting people in very simple ways, and making those connections in a very fast and distributed sort of way. This is the power of a networked society and of cheap, real-time communication networks.

As Tufekci notes, what happens in social networks is the creation of what sociologist Mark Granovetter called “weak ties” in a seminal piece of research in the 1970s (PDF link) — that is, the kinds of ties you have to your broader network of friends and acquaintances, as opposed to the strong ties that you have to your family or your church or your close friends. But while Gladwell more or less dismissed the value of those ties in his New Yorker piece about how little value social media has when it comes to “real” activism, Tufekci argues that these weak ties can become connected to our stronger relationships, and that’s when real change can occur.

New movements that can bring about global social change will still require people who interact with each other regularly, and trust and depend on each other in somewhat dense networks. Or only hope is if those networks span the globe in a tightly-knit, broad web of activity, interaction, personalization. Real change will come only if we can make friends we care about everywhere and we make bridge ties that cover the world in a web of common humanity.

In places like Tunisia and Egypt, for example, individuals or small groups might be thinking about or working towards revolution, but it isn’t until they connect with other people or groups — or see evidence of others who feel the same — that this tips over into actual activity. As Jared Cohen of Google Ideas said recently, social-media tools can be a powerful “accelerant” in those situations. A recent report from the security consulting agency Stratfor looked at how social media can be used by activist groups to spread their message and co-ordinate activities.

That’s not to say that the question of who is using which tool is inherently more interesting than the actual human acts of bravery and risks that people in Tunisia and Egypt have taken, or are taking — but those tools and that activity can bring things to a tipping point that might otherwise not have occurred, or spur others (possibly even in other countries) to do something similar. And that is interesting — or should be — regardless of what Malcolm Gladwell might think.

There’s been a lot of pre-launch interest in Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad “newspaper” The Daily, in part because the News Corp. (s nws) founder is known for making ambitious bets on new technology — even if they don’t always work out, as he found with MySpace — and also because Apple (s aapl) was a key partner, and used the News app to launch its new subscription model for content. So does The Daily live up to its billing? Is it the future of newspapers? Not really. It does some interesting things, but it also does some very confusing things, particularly around sharing content. And much of it, apart from some bells and whistles, consists of fairly humdrum day-old stories that you might read in, well… a regular old printed newspaper.

The first clue to what you get with The Daily, as more than one person has noted, is in the name itself. It is published more or less just like a regular newspaper, in the sense that the bulk of the content is produced and then published to the app once a day. Although News Corp. made a point of noting at its launch event that the app will be updated throughout the day as news breaks, there was no sign of that happening while I used it for most of the day on Wednesday, and that was while riots were still breaking out in Cairo. Even though Twitter content appeared in a box in one of the stories (a profile of Rihanna) and had live links, the actual tweets themselves were almost 12 hours old — even after the app updated itself and said it was downloading a new version of the paper.

The result is that you get something that feels very much like a newspaper, with stories about things that happened yesterday. And while you can share stories via Facebook and Twitter, none of the pieces contain any links to anything on the web, making the app feel very much like similar apps from newspapers such as the New York Times and magazines such as Esquire and Wired — disconnected from the Internet in a lot of ways. There are live links in Twitter streams in stories (particularly the customizable sports section, which lets you follow teams), and there is a small section of links called “What We’re Reading,” but other than that there isn’t a whole lot of linking going on at all. There’s also no way to contact the writers or interact with them in any way, as Salon founder Scott Rosenberg noted, apart from posting a comment (which you can also do via audio, an unusual choice).

When it comes to sharing the content, The Daily doesn’t really have a website that is open to the public since it is a subscription app (it costs 99 cents a week or $39 for a year), but when you share a link to a story via Facebook or Twitter, people can click through and read it — a “social media passthrough” that the New York Times is also reportedly building into its upcoming web paywall. But with The Daily, when you click through to read the piece, you get what amounts to a screenshot of the app page; in other words, it’s an image rather than actual text. With some stories, you also get a large warning, complete with a big exclamation mark, that says the story is “missing content available only in The Daily iPad app.” There is no way to navigate from that story to any other story on the site, even if it has been shared already, just a link to download the app.

All of that aside, the biggest issue with The Daily is that even when you share a story, there is little that might encourage anyone to cough up the money to subscribe (a Columbia Journalism Review editor called it “a general-interest publication that is not generally interesting” and added that “great design will not trump lackluster content”). In the inaugural version, there were a couple of features that were worth reading, but they didn’t add much to similar stories that have appeared elsewhere for free. And a surprising amount of what appeared in the app — once you got past all the videos, most of which were devoted to advertising, and the interactive Sudoku and crossword puzzles — was run-of-the-mill news briefs that you might see in any newspaper such as USA Today. Many of them, in fact, appeared to be rewritten wire copy.

Much of the pre-launch promotion of The Daily suggested that it was going to focus on the content in a way that many newspapers don’t, and that the $30 million or so Rupert Murdoch was spending on the project indicated there would be a higher level of quality. But while the app is well designed and the articles and photos are nice to look at, there isn’t a whole lot on the content side that makes it any better than newspapers that can already be read for free — and whose links can be shared and read without the bizarre restrictions that The Daily has invented. David Weidner of WSJ’s MarketWatch said that “the pricing is right,” and that $40 a year made more sense than $240 a year for the New York Times, and it’s true that the low price may get some to sign up — but the bigger question is, how many?

Apple caused a minor firestorm of criticism on Tuesday after it rejected Sony’s eReader app from the app store, saying the service had to allow in-app purchases as well as those that take place on Sony’s website. The company later clarified that this was always the rule for apps, but that it is cracking down on the practice now, and requiring all apps which allow external purchases to also offer in-app purchases — which go through the Apple payment system, and therefore give the company its standard 30-percent cut of every sale.

The news caused all kinds of consternation from media-industry observers, but the deal is really very simple: if you want to use Apple as your distribution platform, you have to pay the piper. That’s a useful lesson for media companies to learn, although it is probably too late for most.

When the first rumors about the imminent launch of an Apple iPad first starting circulating, many newspaper companies and other media outlets leaped at the chance to partner with the company and get their content on the new device. At the time, I (and others) warned that the new tablet was unlikely to be the Holy Grail solution to the systemic problems of the traditional media industry — and also that publishers of all kinds should be careful what they wished for. By giving media companies an all-in-one platform for reaching readers and viewers and potentially selling them content via iPad apps (although that hasn’t been going all that well so far), Apple was also locking down its control over that distribution channel and the relationship with those readers and viewers.

This became obvious when some media outlets started negotiating with Apple about a subscription-based newsstand — a service the company is expected to announce tomorrow, when it launches Rupert Murdoch’s highly-touted new iPad-only publication, The Daily. Apple balked at the idea of giving publishers access to any of the subscription or user data that would come from such an arrangement, saying only it would be able to see that data. For media companies, that kind of information is a huge part of how they sell their content to advertisers, by showing that they are reaching the right demographics and therefore that their content is worth buying.

Then Apple did the same kind of thing that it just did with Sony: it reportedly told newspaper companies that they would no longer be able to give their readers a free subscription to their content through their iPad app — instead, they would have to sign them up for a regular subscription via the app. Just as with the Sony deal, the obvious intention was to shut off a potential escape route by which media companies could provide access to their content, and thereby avoid the 30-percent door charge at the Apple store. Frederic Filloux summed this up nicely in a recent post on the Monday Note blog.

That Apple is doing any of this shouldn’t come as any surprise. What’s the point of controlling a platform like the iPhone and the iPad if you can’t force people to pay you a carrying charge for hosting their content and connecting them with their customers? Allowing Sony or the New York Times to either give away their content for free or to sell it under their own terms and keep the proceeds doesn’t make any sense — it would be like a shopping mall owner giving tenants space for free, then allowing them to send shoppers out to the parking lot to finish a transaction, so they wouldn’t have to pay the mall owner his share. All Apple is saying is “Have your website if you want — but we still get our cut.”

Call it a Faustian bargain or a deal with the devil or whatever you want, but Apple is the one who came up with devices that are so appealing, and a content-distribution model that is so effective, that it has sold billions of apps in a remarkably short space of time, and created a whole generation of users who look to it for content such as newspapers, magazines, e-books and games. Putting your eggs in Apple’s basket is a great way to get them to market — but just remember who owns the basket, and who you have to pay for carrying it. They are the ones who control some of the key terms of your relationship with your customers, not you. And over in the corner stands Google, waving frantically.