Currently browsing posts tagged: Human Rights.

The e-G8: Promises and Problems

The G8, as I’m sure my readers know, is a forum for the governments of eight of the world’s wealthiest economies. While topics on the G8′s agenda are often globally relevant (energy policy, the environment), the G8 has, over the years, been the target of protests and criticism from a variety of parties, including labor [...]

22.05.2011

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Building Human Rights Into Your Social Site

…goes the name of the panel I spoke on yesterday at SXSW Interactive, alongside Danny O’Brien of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Rebecca MacKinnon, and Ebele Okobi-Harris, director of the Business & Human Rights program at Yahoo. Rebecca, Danny and I frequently deal with complaints from activists in respect to account deactivations and other human [...]

15.03.2011

3 Comments

Social Media and Human Rights in the Media

I’m extremely pleased–yes, without snark–to see the media picking up on the very auspicious topic of incorporating human rights into social media platforms, a topic I’ve been tracking since March of 2010, and which I covered in my paper, Policing Content in the Quasi-Public Sphere. Others, like Rebecca MacKinnon and Danny O’Brien of CPJ, have [...]

11.02.2011

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Facebook Responds

I’ve been writing about Facebook woes for nearly four months, so imagine my surprise yesterday when I received an e-mail from a Facebook staffer in response to my blog posts. Since I don’t have said staffer’s express permission to use his name or post his e-mail in its entirety, I will instead post the most [...]

27.07.2010

11 Comments

Policing Content in the Quasi-Public Sphere

As I’ve written before, Facebook has, in numerous cases in various countries, deleted accounts, groups, or content put on their site by activists. From Hong Kong, where activists have written an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg complaining of Facebook’s harassment and deactivation of activists, to Morocco, where some activists have been deleted from the site, asked for identification in order to reinstate their accounts, then received no assistance upon sending said identification, Facebook users are fed up.

15.05.2010

7 Comments

How the U.S. Censors Arabs

In my spare time, I’ve been doing a lot of talking to activists and reporters about two issues that are getting very little coverage in the U.S., despite both being facets of U.S. policy. The first is H.R. 2278, which eatbees has done a better job than I ever could of explaining here. For those [...]

29.01.2010

2 Comments

Jason Calacanis Shows His (Horribly Bigoted) Stripes

Here’s no secret: Jason Calacanis doesn’t impress me. Sure, the dude can make money (but so could Bernie Madoff), but as far as ideas go? I’m underwhelmed, seriously and truly underwhelmed. So today, when I spotted this delicious rant of Jason’s on TechCrunch, I was quite pleased to be among the first in line to [...]

04.01.2010

55 Comments

On Homosexuality in Morocco

The Syrian blogosphere recently got fired up over the subject of homosexuality.  Specifically, a group of bloggers of a variety of backgrounds launched a campaign against homosexuality, and another group of bloggers responded rationally (though angrily).  As my dear friend Razan pointed out in this epic post: It is very outrageous for some and for [...]

31.03.2009

10 Comments