China Blocks Access to Linkedin –By Neal Ungerleider| Fast Company

Users in China are reporting that access to LinkedIn has been blocked throughout the country. By all indications, it seems that the popular career networking site has run afoul of the country’s infamous Great Firewall.

According to LinkedIn’s Hani Durzy, the company is aware of a blockage in China and is “currently in the process of investigating the situation further.”

The shutdown follows days of calls for a “Jasmine Revolution” in China, on the model of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Access to Twitter and Facebook has been blocked throughout China for some time; Chinese internet users seeking to use Twitter have been forced to access the site through difficult-to-use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

However, Chinese dissidents have another way of accessing Twitter… LinkedIn. Use of LinkedIn, which is fully integrated with Twitter, was by far the easiest way to access Twitter in China. Messages can be easily read and posted through Twitter via LinkedIn.

One Chinese Twitter user who accesses both Twitter and LinkedIn through a proxy posted photos to Twitpic that seem to confirm a Chinese LinkedIn outage.

Adding credence to the LinkedIn-shutdown-to-block-Twitter strategy is the news that the Chinese government has started censoring the name of U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman from search results on the wildly popular homegrown Twitter/Tumblr clones Sina Weibo/QQ Weibo. Weibo means “microblog” in Chinese.

Huntsman faces widespread charges in China of support for the Jasmine Revolution after a citizen journalist spotted him watching a pro-democracy protest from within a crowd this past Sunday. Like any good American abroad, Huntsman was standing outside a McDonald’s.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Chinese dissidents have been disseminating calls to protest and organizing events via LinkedIn. Reuters notes that the LinkedIn outage could hurt the firm’s chances at an IPO:

“If the disruption for LinkedIn is permanent in China, it could hurt the company’s prospects at an IPO as a ban would exclude the company from the world’s largest Internet market–about 450 million users and growing.”

“It certainly would be a negative in terms of the company’s future growth and profitability,” said Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida.

“This is something where investors would take it into account and be willing to pay a little lower price per share.” Luckily for LinkedIn, China’s Internet censors are notoriously fickle: Sites blip on and off the Great Firewall frequently, with no prior warning. Related: Fast Company’s Anya Kamenetz recently interviewed LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman. Read more about the social networking site as part of our Most Innovative Companies of 2011 project.

Reprint: China Blocks Access to Linkedin –By Neal Ungerleider | Fast Company

 

Google Executive Ghonin is Egypt’s Reluctant Hero of Tahrir Square | France24 + Dream TV Interview

Google Executive Wael Ghonim was detained by the Egyptian government for 12 days. Photo: facebook

Wael Ghomin, a rising marketing manager at Google, has become an icon of the revolt in Egypt. His recent emotional TV appearance set off a new wave of protests calling for the immediate resignation of President Mubarak.

On Monday evening the private Egyptian television channel Dream TV broadcast an interview with an emotional man who kept insisting that he was no hero. The man on the screen was Wael Ghonim, a 30-year-old Google executive who had just spent 12 days in detention.

A hero’s welcome nonetheless awaited Ghonim at Tahrir Square the next day.

Inspired by his release and emotional TV appearance, thousands of Egyptians joined the gathering in downtown Cairo, which on Tuesday saw one of its largest days of protests since the movement to oust President Hosni Mubarak began.

Emotional Comeback

Ghonim’s disappearance on January 28 precipitated a broad movement of support online. Some protesters went so far as to make his release a pre-condition for dialogue with the government.

Shortly after he was freed on Monday, Ghonim was back on the social media website Twitter, thanking Google for its  efforts to find him after he was arrested. Later in the day he gave an interview that became instantly famous

Speaking about the conditions of his detention, Ghonim said he was not mistreated. However he had to repeatedly argue that he was no traitor –an accusation he heard in jail. “I can bear anything,” he said on television, “except being accused of betraying Egypt.”

He also admitted that he was the anonymous administrator of the Facebook group “We Are All Khaled Said” – one of the most influential rallying points on the Web for Egypt’s raging anti-government protesters.

By turning Khaled Said –an internet blogger who was beaten to death by police in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in June 2010 – into a symbol of Egyptian resistance, Ghonim inadvertently set himself up to become the iconof the revolt.

No Longer Behind the Keyboard

“Long live Egypt!” Ghonim yelled out to the thousands of protesters in Tahrir who rejoiced in his first public appearance the day after his release. “We will not abandon our demand, and that is the departure of the regime,” he told the crowd.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, someone in a crowd reminded Wael that 100,000 people on Facebook were asking him to be the spokesman for the uprising.

“Will you do it?” the man wanted to know.”I don’t know,” said a teary and still reluctant hero.

Reprint: Google Executive Ghonin is Egypt’s Reluctant Hero of Tahrir Square –By Joseph Bamat & Sébastian Seibt| France24

 

Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution: People Power & Social Media Networks

New and social media was one of the driving forces that kept the protests alive, giving Tunisians an effective way to coordinate/ Photo: Al Jazeera

Contrary to civil unrests in Tunisia during the last few years, the dramatic death of 26 year old university graduate Mohamed Bouazizi sparked off angry protests in many parts of the country and have attracted international media attention thanks to social media networks. The dramatic events have escalated into more riots in Bizerte, Jandouba, Gasserine, Baja, Sfax, Nabeul, Hammamet, and even in the capital Tunis, among other towns and cities.

This emergency situation has compelled the government to say that they will swiftly kick-start development projects, namely in the southern deprived areas of the country.

President Ben Ali initially pledged 5 billion Tunisian dinars for the development of Sidi Bouzid and other towns. He then promised the creation of 300,000 new jobs for the next two years. In another major step, he sacked key ministers from the cabinet in an attempt to calm down his critics and buy time to bring the country back to order.

Faced with even more growing unrest (and in a latest move) the president promised to open up freedom of expression in the media, to free up political life, to bring to justice corrupt politicians and above all free the media and remove all restrictions on the internet.

Yet all these measure came in the eleventh hour. The mounting pressure, which turned into a revolution, has forced the president to flee the country.

The Role of New Media

In light of the dramatic development of events, on a considerable scale, it has become evident that new media have been playing a key role this time around in keeping the momentum going, and bringing the voices of the disengaged Tunisian youth to the attention of world media, and hence to international public opinion.

Mobile phones, blogs, YouTube, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds have become instrumental in mediating the live coverage of protests and speeches, as well as police brutality in dispersing demonstrations.

The internet in this case has assumed the role of a very effective uncensored news agency from which every broadcaster and news corporation have been able to freely source newsfeeds, raw from the scene.

Such developments have proven very significant in changing the rules of the game, of journalism production and dissemination of information in a country where the government historically keeps tight control on the media and where almost no platform is available for opinions critical of the political elite.

Decades of State Media Control

Article 1 of the Press Code in Tunisia provides for “freedom of the press, publishing, printing, distributing and sale of books and publications”. The Tunisian constitution asserts that the “liberties of opinion, expression, the press, publication, assembly, and association are guaranteed and exercised within the conditions defined by the law”.

Yet as early as 1956, with the birth of the first republic under the leadership of President Habib Bourguiba, the ruling government gained control over the press - and later over broadcasting. As a result almost all the media outlets remained propaganda tools in the hands of Bourguiba’s government and ruling party.

Under Ben Ali (who came to power through a coup in 1987) the media and government relationship got even worse. For a short period of time a few independent newspapers appeared, but their existence was short lived.

Television and radio have remained state controlled and primarily serving the ruling government. The Tunisian Radio and Television Establishment (ERTT) is state-run and operates Tunis 7 (satellite channel), and Canal 21 (terrestrial channel). However, the audiovisual landscape witnessed the launch of the first private TV channel (Hannibal TV) headed by Larbi Nasra on February 13, 2005. The channel broadcasts via satellite and terrestrially, and is aimed at expanding the audience’s choice by producing a variety of programs.

Increase of State-Owned Radio Channels

Three ‘independent’ radio stations have also been licensed which include: Radio Mosaique FM, Jawhara FM (caters mainly for youth programs), and Zitouna FM - owned by Mohamed Sakhr Almatri - launched on September 13, 2007 and was dedicated to the recitation of the Quran, the Prophet Mohammad’s life and broadcasting tarawih prayers during Ramadan.

A fundamental role the state TV does is to promote the image of the president as a competent, successful and progressive leader. Almost half of the main evening news program on TV7 or Channel 21 report on the everyday meetings, initiatives and engagements the president takes part in.

The emergence of a couple of ‘independent’ radio and television stations during the last few years has not improved the situation as the scope of freedom of expression remains controlled by the same regimental unwritten rules: No room for opposing opinions; it is a taboo to criticize the president, cabinet ministers, or government corruption; et al.

Civil society organizations, lawyers, academics, and trade unions do not have a platform to express their critical views on state media or ‘independent’ media.

The press has also had a stormy experience with tight censorship measures placed on them during the last few decades. Major newspapers in the country have developed self-censorship rules in order to survive, and they mainly report uncritically on the government policies.

Other international newspapers (Le Monde, Liberation, Le Figaro, Al-Quds Alarabi to name a few) that attempt to expose government corruption, human rights abuses and the country’s democratic deficit get censored.

According to Reporters without Borders, “journalists and human rights activists have been the target of constant bureaucratic harassment, police violence and surveillance by the intelligence services.” The government has direct control on the servers, and “the regime has become almost obsessive about control of news and information”.

Excerpt, read article: Tunisia: A Media Revolution? – By Dr. Noureddine Miladi |AlJazeera

 

Related:  U.N. Chief Calls Urges Efforts to Quell Tunisia Unrest –By Adam Schreck| Washington Post

The Key Players in Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution – By Dan Murphy | Christian Science Monitor

The Scent of Rage –By Anne Applebaum | Washington Post

Tunisia’s Crisis in Picture | MarketWatch Gallery