Iran is considering a permanent ban on Telegram. To make it effective, they will probably have to go after VPNs too. Interestingly, a lot of the opposition seems to have an economic basis. Is this the basis of Gyanendra’s Law and its various exceptions? For the many small-business owners who use Telegram to market their services and communicate with clients, the ban adds to their financial woes.
Occasionally, I accept invitations to speak on subjects I am still exploring in my mind. The talk I am going to give today at an event called Festival of our Future falls into that category. Should I apologize for not knowing the full and complete answer on how to fix politics? Not really. This is from a book review written by one of the world’s leading political philosophers: In recent decades, American public discourse has become hollow and shrill.
After a weeklong blackout, the Sri Lankan government lifted its nationwide ban on social media on Thursday. Facebook and several other platforms had been shut down after days of violence targeting Muslims in the Kandy district, a popular destination for tourists and pilgrims.
I was asked by the FT about the Facebook shut-down decision of the government. Here is my response: It is true that Facebook as well as Viber, etc. have been, and are being, extensively used by various extremist groups to organize. The climate for this conflagration was created by mainstream media such as Divaina, which gave coverage to hate speech as well as by hate speech messages that were circulated among their circles of friends and family without central direction by members of the majority community using social media, not limited to Facebook. The root cause of the problem lies in this insidious spread of falsehoods and hate over multiple years, not solely in the specific messages being communicated now.
I was asked to say a few words on how to use social media at a meeting of government information officers. I anchored my comments around what had occurred in the last few years to make me change my thinking on whether government could effectively use social media. Government organizations provide a range of services to citizens and non-citizens (e.g., foreign investors, visitors).
There was a big kerfuffle about China banning Whatsapp. But when Saudi Arabia did the “beheading” in 2013, much less outrage. Oh well. It helps when you have driven expectation down to the negative range. But anyway, they seem to have figured that there’s a downside in not having these services.
Just a few days ago, I wrote about an Australian scholar expressing skepticism about the importance of Facebook as a news channel. I referred to Pew Research on the subject from 2016. Now the 2017 results are in: As of August 2017, two-thirds (67%) of Americans report that they get at least some of their news on social media – with two-in-ten doing so often, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. This is a modest increase since early 2016, when (during the height of the presidential primaries) 62% of U.S.
We talk about time-bound opportunities that open up for effective policy intervention: policy windows. Similar “windows” open up in public discourse. One needs to grab them before they disappear. Of course, one can seek to expand and shape the window as well. Few days back, an online publication carried a few pieces on public intellectuals.
Never a good idea to read a paper, even though one existed because I wrote it up at the request of the organizers of the Manipal conference. Here is the conclusion: The communication space has been transformed by the attention economy. Thinking on policy has changed, with policy expected to set the ground rules for all participants rather than just define the role of the state. Operational challenges are significant given the difficulties of delimiting the scope of communication policy. But even more challenging is that theory has not caught up with practice.
In 1997, twenty years ago, I wrote an overview piece on what I thought would be the “horizon” issues telecom regulators should think about. It was a book chapter in a book edited by Bill Melody: Samarajiva, R, (1997). “Telecommunication regulation in the information age,” in Telecom reform: Principles, policies and regulatory practices, ed. W. H.
We at LIRNEasia have been more interested in the outcomes of new forms of communication, especially by those hitherto excluded, than on the modalities of communication. But that does not mean we’re uninterested. Why we post looks informative. TO SOME, Facebook, Twitter and similar social-media platforms are the acme of communication—better, even, than face-to-face conversations, since more people can be involved. Others think of them more as acne, a rash that fosters narcissism, threatens privacy and reduces intelligent discourse to the exchange of flippant memes.
Knowing the importance of networks, LIRNEasia has always probed about circles of friends and contacts and the role of ICTs in maintaining those relationships. Good to see the results of a study focusing entirely on that: The survey asked 2,000 people, chosen because they were regular social-network users, and a further 1,375 adults in full-time employment, who might or might not have been such users, how many friends they had on Facebook. The results showed, to no surprise whatsoever on the part of Dr Dunbar, that the average number of Facebook friends in the two groups were Dunbar-sized numbers: 155 and (when those who did not use Facebook at all were excluded) 187, respectively. Other details matched Dr Dunbar’s earlier work, too. This described a pair of smaller socially relevant numbers—a support clique (people you would rely on in a crisis) of about five and a sympathy group (those you would call close friends) of about 15.
Still waiting for a systematic account, but until then, here’s a journalistic account that quotes our friend Nay Phone Latt and has a picture of him in his constituency office. Facebook has been an obvious choice for most, and the National League for Democracy, or NLD, which won a landslide victory over the Union Solidarity and Development Party, or USDP, has been particularly successful at leveraging social media as a tool. “That was how I communicated with my people and my constituency, mostly through these accounts. People would send me questions, responses and opinions via my Facebook page and account,” said Nay Phone Latt, a newly elected Yangon Region lawmaker for the NLD. “One of my friends called it ‘the silent revolution.
Instagram facilitates photo/ video sharing and social networking. Instagram community consists of over 400 million and is one of the largest ad platforms in the world. Access to this ad platform provides access to Instagram user data. Based on this, we acquired Instagram user data on Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar and Bangladesh. When comparing these four countries, Bangladesh has the highest Instagram users and Myanmar has the lowest.
Cass Sunstein wrote Republic.com in 2001. I have the book. He updated it. The basic thesis was that people would enclose themselves in ideological bubbles and not hear the other side.
For many, the only thing new about what journalists write about mobiles in Myanmar would be Myanmar. But I was thinking about the hate speech angle, which is, without question, going to be extremely significant in that country. Mobiles and social media are not the causes of hate speech; they are the enablers and accelerators of hate speech. Like in the old Yugoslavia, there would have been a lot of enmity toward “the other” in Myanmar. But the whole thing was bottled up and suppressed, not because the military government was against hate speech, but against all speech.