Sarah Kendzior appears to have stopped digging among exclusive Uzbek-language materials that leave her with "more questions than answers" about terrorist-suspect Jamshid Muhtorov -- and has fallen silent on that case (so typical of what happens with controversial stories at Registan).
Twitter's awful new country-by-country censorship policy provides her with a hook to hawk her theory of the "secret Internet" of Uzbeks -- that special-sauce web where Uzbeks only speak in Uzbek to each other, so that the rest of us can't know what they're talking about -- and MORE importantly, require the expert services of Prof. Kendzior to interpret it for us.
I suspect those secret Uzbeks are talking about soccer games and cars and rap videos and love interests and the price of gasoline, just like anybody else anywhere, and aren't so super-arcane-special, but I could be wrong, as I hardly know any Uzbek. I do know Russian, though, and since a lot of Uzbeks will speak Russian on Russian-language news sites, I see they aren't THAT different than everybody else.
In fact, one of the reasons anthropologists may secretly mistrust the Internet and see it as "a problem" is that it both homogenizes people and makes them more similar with a mass global culture (like it or not, there it is) AND it reveals to people that they aren't so different from one another. That puts anthropologists out of a job!
Kendzior's theory of the "secret Internet" hypothesizes about:
regional activists whose situations do not get discussed because we don’t know much about them, and we don’t know much about them because social media skews our understanding toward popular languages, successful causes, familiar geopolitical contexts, and media-savvy dissidents who know how to attract an international following.
So as I suspected, she maintains an ideal picture of the Ur-community of Uzbekistan, untainted by those nasty Westernized human rights activists or exile-influenced political dissidents who just turn into "media-savvy" showboats on social media. If only we can scrape away the acretions of social media's "skewing," and its "popular" languages like English or Russian, or "successful causes," why, we will find the "authentic" people of Uzbekistan.
I was thinking that Sarah might actually oppose the Twitter policy in some useful way, even with this sort of narrow sectarianism, but she doesn't at all -- it's merely yet another occasion for her to toot her horn with her ethnic specialness theories.
And here's what's wrong with it again:
Her prime example is the cases of Malohat Eshonqulova and Saodat Omonova, two journalists who blew the whistle on corruption and censorship at their TV station and who were dismissed, and then who went on a hunger strike. They had one Twitter account, @Malohat_Saodat which you could follow (which I did) -- if you spoke Uzbek, as most of it was in Uzbek.
I was among the journalists in this field who wrote about their case repeatedly -- you can see that in fact far from not being covered, and being in an Uzbek-language silo, these journalists were able to get their story known because Russian-language correspondents, and Uzbek emigre sites willing to report in the Russian and English languages, were thus able to reach wider audiences. And all those journalists additionally tweeted about their hunger strike. Just not a lot of them.
I will say there's a factor in these kinds of stories that can work against coverage. Human rights activists and journalists don't like hunger strikes as a publicity tool. I sure don't -- and I know others don't even if they don't like to speak of it for fear of being politically incorrect. Hunger strikers trying to force attention to their cause hit hardest against those directly next to them -- the family members and the usually already-overstressed local human rights movement now forced to drop everything and accommodate somebody's decision to use force in this way. Indeed, it is a form of violence, and that's why none other than the Dalai Lama himself has spoken against hunger strikes as a campaigning tool.
Protest fasts like this seldom work to get the attention of the people who are supposed to reverse decisions or make new ones -- and this one didn't. Sometimes they do, if there's a lot of momentum, but this one didn't. In fact, at one point, the journalists had to call off a press conference because foreign embassy people wouldn't come. They may not have wanted to be helping to further incite a health-damaging action -- there was also speculation that the human rights defender who was supposed to help with the news release on email didn't send it around, although he claims he did.
The story becomes about the drama of the hunger strike and less about the conditions that prompted it, which is a shame, because these two women had an important story to tell about the corruption and oppression of state TV.
In any event, aside from these drawbacks this story did get as much attention as anything can expect to get in Uzbekistan, and the fact that they tweeted only in Uzbek was entirely irrelevant, because there is a persistent and hardy corps of human rights defenders and independent reporters, both Uzbeks and Russians in Tashkent, who keep reporting on these things and give it wider coverage through exile press and the foreign RFE/RL and BBC. Indeed, just like the Abadan story, this story wasn't about tweeting because it was more about independent and alternative news sites -- that doesn't fit the "progressive" social media theory and so the theorists tend to discount the role of those sites in amplifying social media (instead of visa versa).
Kendzior takes a narrow look at this only through the Twitter lens:
Most of their tweets were in Uzbek, although some were in Russian. By the time of their final post, they had tweeted 730 times, had amassed around 65 followers, and had attracted no international media attention or global outcry.
But in fact specialized international media did cover them and various nonprofit web sites like Index on Censorship -- which is more than most stories get covered out of this country and is about to be expected for Central Asia.
And groups like Human Rights Watch did take up the case to a certain extent (I recall discussing it with them), but within the harsh attention-economy of their own internal priorities, this case and this country was not going to be flavour of the month -- in part because it didn't illustrate other easy-to-understand global issues and in part because it couldn't be won.
There are a number of reasons why the human rights causes from this region never gets picked up globally:
1. Few English speakers -- Russian is the lingua franca and fewer young Western journalists speak it, and fewer Central Asians as well.
2. The global left always treated the Soviet Union as "progressive" and even took ideological instruction from Moscow -- these old memes and ideologies and networks die very, very hard (look at RTV and its disgraceful following). It is very hard to get the left excited about anything happening in these countries that they felt were workers' paradises for decades. If you can't get the global left excited about a cause, and if they don't see how it fits in with their own anti-corporate anti-imperialist, etc. agenda easily, it's hard to get energy behind a cause -- the global right isn't as causey. The global left could easily pick up the narratives of Iran (an enemy of the US) and Egypt (whose dictator was propped up by the US for decades). The same dynamics apply in some of the stans, but the narrative isn't as clearcut and compelling.
3. As a consequence of no. 2, the global activist networks tend to see dissidents or social movements of resistance in these countries as reactionary, i.e. nationalists, extremists, paid for by the West, etc. They don't take them seriously or even think they shouldn't get near them for fear of "taint" from their own enemies (their own governments, neoliberal politicians, blah blah).
4. While some of the ingredients in this region like the presence of US bases or US military exigencies like the Northern Distribution Network could potential get the blood flowing the way bases or presences in Turkey or the Phillipines or Saudi Arabia can get people indignant and supporting local rebel causes, the war in Afghanistan never engendered a mass anti-war movement like other wars because it was believed to be a "just war" involving legal pursuit of terrorists who had first attacked the US on 9/11.
So it's not just the saga of Malohat and Saodat -- it's any activist that does anything in this part of the world -- they have not only the language barrier and the technological problem and the sheer financial problem of having to use up scarce funds to keep Twitter going from a cell phone -- they encounter the Soviet wall that surrounds any form of activism related to this region to this day.
Sarah concedes that the independent media helped publicize this case, but she doesn't seem to want to concede the role of the Western broadcasters, nonprofit Western media, etc. And unfortunately -- but not surprisingly, given her tendency to go with the establishment -- she comes around to invoking "the law" in the same disingenous way that Tufekci does:
Tufekci is correct that Twitter’s policy is realistic – as she points out, “the Internet is not a ‘virtual’ space, and cyberspace is not a planet which can float above all jurisdictions forever.” But realistic does not mean right. Twitter’s policy privileges the already privileged, hurting nascent dissident movements and the regional activists who struggle to promote them.
As I pointed out on my tech blog Wired State, there isn't just law when it comes to Uzbekistan, so enabling that brutal regime to invoke "the law" is just plain wrong. I don't know what's really driving this for Tufekci. I suspect it's part of the platform-uber-alles that I see with all these gurus lining up now behind Twitter -- and serving as the best proof I've had yet of the existenced of the nascent Wired State -- that its own network and own sustainability on corporate platforms are more important than democratic institutions and universal principles and the rule of law organically. These gurus could all become the lapdogs of the big social media companies because their power derives from these platforms -- if they don't have Twitter or Facebook or Google+, they don't have the substrate for their theories.
Kendzior merely joins them with a local quibble -- and she takes a poke at them as internationalists without enough particularity for her own special snowflake, Uzbekistan.
Jillian York puts up her dukes in the comments, admitting she "bristles" at the word "elites" -- Kendzior implies that the Arab Spring people and their adoring global left (of which Jillian is an avid part) are the sounding board for elites in these countries (and indeed, that is about the size of it) and that's the only reason Twitterati know about them. (Indeed, as we know, Anne-Marie Slaughter could cook up an entire international relations theory around the fact that she has some inside connections at State she could tweet about an Egyptian woman arrested, and Tufecki could write a post triple the length of most of mine explaining how wonderful all that was.)
Jillian tries to sink any claim of elitism by saying that the sheer number of Arabic speakers in the world -- 310 million -- which she says dwarfs the number of Russian speakers "by half" -- means that they are inherently "not elitist". This is silly on several fronts, because for one, there are way more than the 147 million Russians of Russia speaking Russian -- there are all the other former Soviet republics with not only sizeable Russian minorities but Russian as a lingua franca -- plus the diasporas, bringing the number up closer to the Arabic speakers. More practically, there's nothing to suggest that all those Arabic speakers are on Twitter or care about the activist issues that York and her friends care about.
Tufecki comes in to the comments to assure us that the real problem is lack of people's willingness to commit civil disobedience, not companies' repressive policies (of course she'd never say that about the struggles of Occupy Wall Street). Her sudden upholding of "law" everywhere and "practicalities" are strangely at odds with her willingness to drop those concerns when it came to SOPA and piracy.
It would be the easiest thing in the world for Tufecki and others simply to call on Twitter not to do business with Uzbekistan and some of the other most severe censoring regimes. It's not as if Twitter is planning to open an office in Tashkent. The only reason Twitter won't do that is because they want to "leave the door open" for commercial opportunities anywhere. That's silly. They should do the same thing that 60 apparel companies have done and announced that they will not knowingly source their fabric from Uzbek cotton -- naturally they can't police every source, but they announce their good intentions. Twitter could function the same way on some of the worst censorship countries -- and include China instead of getting greedy about expansion. Like Facebook, Twitter has only the ad-click and marketing data-scrape as business models.
The worst thing about the accommodationist approach to Twitter's bureaucratic solutions by Tufecki and others is that they proffer the "transparency" and the "tools" of seeing chillingeffects.org as somehow a good enough substitute for not doing the right thing. But they aren't, because the system will be overwhelmed with DMCA notices and arcane British libel suits and it will be hard to pick the signals out of the noise. As I've noted, creating "an international conversation about what gets censored" far from being "liberating" is going to tend to reinforce and validate censorship and create new supportive audiences for it.
The coyness with which Twitter and its lapdog social-media gurus are telling people they can just Tor around this policy or toggle their geolocation is nauseating, too, given what's most likely to happen is that states will cut off Twitter completely -- they already do that with Youtube in some countries such as Turkmenistan.
