These events, from the Arab Spring to Wikileaks to U.K. Riots, were all fundamentally shaped by the use of social media, and in many cases would have never happened without social networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
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Editor in chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, stars in a parody of the well-known MasterCard commercials, which has gone viral over the last few days, in order to single out MasterCard, Visa, Bank of America, Paypal and Western Union for blocking donations to WikiLeaks.
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were the hot topic at WikiLeaks and Online Civil Disobedience, a Social Media Week New York panel hosted by the Personal Democracy Forum and moderated by its editor and curator, Micah Sifry.
Speakers at the event, in order, were Deanna Zandt, author of Share This: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking; Evgeny Morozov, author of new book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom; and John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The event was held at Hearst’s Art & Culture Hub in Manhattan.
Zandt made it a point to differentiate between DDoS attacks and hacking, saying, “Denial-of-service attacks are not hacking. Hacking tends to be where systems are broken into and data are compromised. None of the business data or practices was compromised in any way. I do feel that DDOS is a civil form of disobedience.”
Speaking specifically about Anonymous, the group responsible for attacking several corporate Web sites in defense of WikiLeaks, she said, “In the past, Anonymous hasn’t done anything in this scale that was explicitly, overtly, hugely political,” adding that the group was made up of “chaos enthusiasts — they’re interested in the drama of chaos unfolding. It’s not as if there was this sleeper cell of people who were ready to attack this big, bad corporation.”
On digital activism in general, Zandt concluded, “I’m often very, very frustrated with what the face of actual digital activism looks like. We have the ability and the freedom to risk ourselves for the benefit of many who don’t. We can’t ultimately rely on these digital tools to do our dirty work. If governments and corporations can easily collude to disable our ability to communicate with one another, what is our response?”
Inspired by WikiLeaks, the City University of New York Graduate School’s Entrepreneurial Journalism program created Localeaks, a simple online form that allows users to send anonymous tips to more than 1,400 newspapers in the United States, ReadWriteWeb reported.
Visitors to Localeaks can select where their tips will go by state and newspaper, and the secure Web connection encrypts the files and text, destroying the originals and deleting metadata, such as cookies, that could enable tracing, according to ReadWriteWeb.
If the targeted newspaper or newspapers express interest, a temporary secure file transfer is established, ReadWriteWeb reported.
The WikiLeaks controversy continued to dominate news links shared by bloggers during the week of Dec. 20-24, while a column by Mashable writer Vadim Lavrusik predicting 10 major developments in news media for 2011 accounted for the most Tweeted news links, and the most-watched news and politics video on YouTube was footage from the Dec. 14 shooting at a Florida school board meeting, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index.
Julian Assange and company accounted for 35 percent of news links shared via the blogosphere, followed by: the repeal of the don’t ask, don’t tell policy in the U.S. military, at 15 percent; Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez defending his plans to impose broadcast-like regulations on the Internet, at 9 percent; an article from The Washington Post about an environmental study that found probable carcinogen hexavalent chromium in the drinking water of 31 out of 35 major cities examined, at 7 percent; and at 6 percent, another Washington Post contribution about the actions by the administration of President Barack Obama relating to Guantanamo Bay.
Only five days after its launch, the WikiLeaks app that was once available in the iTunes Store is no more – at least not on any of Apple’s platforms.
Keith Olbermann‘s self-imposed suspension from Tweeting lasted about as long as his MSNBC-imposed suspension from hosting Countdown with Keith Olbermann, as the talk-show host returned to Twitter with this Tweet Sunday:
And we’re back. Tweeting will resume tomorrow. Good night and… etc. (Avatar dates to 1971 at Yankee Stadium).
At the time of this post, Olbermann had Tweeted twice more, including this promise to go into more details about the controversy that drove him to temporarily quit the microblogging service in the first place:
FYI there will be a tweet (and some retweets) later today about the #mooreandme spectacle
Olbermann reacted to extensive criticism via the microblogging service over hosting filmmaker Michael Moore on Countdown, during which Moore said the controversy over WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was overblown, and for retweeting a link from Bianca Jagger that dismissed the charges against Assange and possibly revealed the identities of the women who accused him of sexual misconduct.
Keith Olbermann is suspended again, but this time it’s from Twitter, not MSNBC, and this one was self-imposed.
According to The Huffington Post, Olbermann reacted to extensive criticism via the microblogging service over hosting filmmaker Michael Moore on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, during which Moore said the controversy over WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was overblown, and for retweeting a link from Bianca Jagger that dismissed the charges against Assange and possibly revealed the identities of the women who accused him of sexual misconduct.
Olbermann’s “final” Tweets, for now:
Approximately 3 p.m. ET:: I’ve discovered that I am accused of being a rape apologist in part because I didn’t remove the quotes from the word rape in a retweet
Minutes later: I’ll thus unblock all blocks, wish you all a Merry Christmas and I’ll suspend this account until/if this frenzy is stopped.
Bloggers shared the most news links about the deal between President Barack Obama and Republicans in Congress on tax cuts, while the WikiLeaks saga accounted for the most Tweeted news links, and the most-watched news and politics video on YouTube was an interview with Thomas Gottschalk, host of German game show Wetten Dass (Bet It), after 23-year-old contestant Samuel Koch attempted to jump a car using spring-loaded stilts known as “kangaroo shoes” and suffered major injuries, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index for the week of Dec. 6-10.
The tax cut represented 15 percent of news links shared via the blogosphere, and it was followed by: an editorial in The Washington Post criticizing movie Fair Game, at 13 percent; Pope Benedict XVI agreeing to use a solar-powered popemobile, at 12 percent; and at 10 percent apiece, WikiLeaks and a BBC article about conservationists in China successfully mating giant pandas which could allow them to be reintroduced into the wild.
“Cablegate” made up 33 percent of Tweeted news links, and it was followed by: Twitter at 19 percent; Google at 12 percent; Apple at 8 percent; and Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg agreeing to join the “giving pledge” created by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to donate most of his wealth to charity, at 7 percent.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has more important things to worry about, like trying to secure his release on bail from prison in Sweden. There is no celebrating in the office of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Lady Gaga is not dancing. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have one less thing to be smug about on Comedy Central, and ditto for Glenn Beck on Fox News Channel. President Barack Obama is dealing with more significant issues, like war and unemployment. Steve Jobs is gearing up for the release of the second-generation iPad. The Chilean miners are probably just happy to be alive. And, much like Assange and Obama, the unemployed American has far more significant issues to deal with.
What do all of those people have in common? They all finished ahead of Mark Zuckerberg in voting by TIME readers for its 2010 Person of the Year, yet the Facebook co-founder and CEO rebounded from finishing No. 10 on the readers’ poll and impressed the magazine’s editors enough to be named TIME 2010 Person of the Year.
From the explanation penned by managing editor Richard Stengel:
Like two of our runners-up this year, Julian Assange and the Tea Party, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have a whole lot of veneration for traditional authority. In a sense, Zuckerberg and Assange are two sides of the same coin. Both express a desire for openness and transparency. While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them. Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends. Both have a certain disdain for privacy: In Assange’s case because he feels it allows malevolence to flourish; in Zuckerberg’s case because he sees it as a cultural anachronism, an impediment to a more efficient and open connection between people.
