There are no half measures when it comes to censorship
Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has taken the foolish step of trying to block Twitter in his country as a way to stop the spread of news about a corruption case affecting his party. This is beautifully illustrated above by the inspired Carlos Latuff, reminding me of the cartoon he drew when Hosni Mubarak cut the internet shortly before he was overthrown in February 2011. Internet censorship was a common feature throughout the whole Arab Spring.
Last month, we saw the same thing in Venezuela: President Nicolás Maduro blocked Twitter, a move that came after his government had already closed down media it considered hostile. Regimes with a tendency toward totalitarianism require control of the media. The Arab spring was prompted in large part by the appearance of information channels that cannot be censored by governments: the social networks. Facebook and Twitter were two of the main means used by a population that largely had no access to the internet, but found a way to share information, completely sidelining the official media’s “nothing to look at here, move on” approach to the revolutions going on around them.
Regimes like Iraq and China maintain their fragile hold on power thanks to self-censorship that works at all levels of society, and is largely based on fear of retribution. People in these countries are subject to control mechanisms that put anybody who steps out of line under suspicion.
Not that liberal governments do not practice censorship or try to control the supposed threat that the new media presents.
Take the case of Spain, where, over the decades, successive governments have sought to control state and privately run media.
Last month, the government announced that it intends to change Spain’s intellectual property right laws, meaning, among other things, that news aggregators will have to pay a fee to news organizations for providing links to their content. This is about the opaque sharing out of institutional advertising, aimed at buying the favors of the press in the run up to a number of key polls, culminating in next year’s general elections. We have recently seen the replacement of the editors of three of the country’s main newspapers: El Mundo, La Vanguardia, and El País.
Articles recently published in ABC and El Mundo, two the country’s main papers, seeking to justify the fee on aggregators, illustrate the extent to which the country’s supposed guardians of truth are now openly prepared to collude with the government to their mutual benefit.
Can anybody ever again really trust anything that either of these organs has to say about the internet or intellectual property rights? Or for that matter their coverage of politics? Can we trust newspapers who replace their editors in return for advertising revenue or fees from news aggregators, the latter a move that infringes one of the basic principles of the internet until now: the freedom to provide links to news and information sources?
In the face of this blatant collusion, concerned Spaniards are right to take action to boycott these media outlets and to shame them publicly. Totalitarianism isn’t always about the heavy hand of the state showing its power, it is also shown in smaller details, along the line of “we know what’s best, leave this to us.”
In Turkey, the Twitter block has been done via DNS, which means that people will to access the service through other means. Graffiti indicating how to access Twitter through Google’s DNS have already appeared on walls throughout the country, along with instructions on how to send Tweets via SMS.
Censoring Twitter or any other internet-based resource, will simply turn into a game of cat and mouse, with negative results: opposition stiffens, censorship hardens, the situation worsens, and eventually violence breaks out, accompanied by arbitrary arrests, and a spiral beings that can lead to a regime falling. If it survives, it will do so by imposing ruthless measures, deepening its isolation from the international community.
In China and Iran, countries whose governments imposed rigid censorship of the net, things are clearly not about to change any time soon. But in Venezuela, where most people will not accept the idea of internet censorship, we may be witnessing the death throws of the government.
There is no way that the Maduro government can simply close sites such as CaracasChronicles, VenezuelaLucha, Maduradas or LaPatilla, to name (and link) but a few. Neither can it shut down the Instagram accounts used by VenezuelaLucha, or DonUngaro or Isaac Paniza,which use citizen journalists. Put simply, when a government tries to close down the net it is shooting itself in the foot.
The social networks reflect the weaknesses and strengths of our political systems, which means that democracy also has to adapt to changing times, something that doesn’t mean we should all start voting via Twitter, or that government should be carried out via the internet. At the same time, simply winning an election no longer empowers a government with democratic legitimacy, which doesn’t come from the polling booths, but, subsequent to election, behaving in a way that demonstrates an understanding of, and commitment to, democratic principles.
And this is a process that the social networks are playing a bigger and bigger role in: they are increasingly the voice of the electorate.
No democracy worth the name can contemplate interfering with the internet, either through direct censorship, or by imposing fees that prevent the free movement of information. And anybody in power who proposes doing so, quite simply is not a true democrat, which in the light of recent events puts the Spanish government in the same camp as those run by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, or Nicolás Maduro, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali or Hosni Mubarak.
An exaggeration, unfair? No, because we aren’t talking here in relative terms, or degrees. In the same way that one can’t be “a bit corrupt”, if you seek to control the internet, you are on the side of the totalitarians, whether in Turkey, Tunisia, Venezuela… or Spain.
Each time a politician considers blocking the internet, in controlling information flows, or in building a media empire, he or she is on the path to becoming a dictator; whether it is favoring this or that lobby, holding on to power, sweeping dirt under the carpet, or all three at the same time. The principles of democracy in the 21st century mean that the electorate have the absolute right to publish what they want on the internet, free of censorship, spying, control, or fees. Anything else is a step toward totalitarianism. When all is said and done, a cat may look at a king.
(En español, aquí)
