 We're starting off this morning with really one of my favorite scholars in one of the most interesting spaces. I think we've been talking about this question of what the open internet means for the public sphere. And one of the questions that's really come up in this is what does the open internet mean for social movements? Does it make it easier for people to get together and protest a government? Is it harder to govern in this age? Is it easier to foment revolution? There are people who have been arguing all sorts of different sides of this case. You have people essentially saying that once we have Facebook and the ability to organize groups, governments fall very quickly. People take to the streets. You have other people essentially saying that's madness, that's craziness. What really matters is people's offline ties, probably, in my opinion, the most insightful and nuanced voice in this space is the voice of our next speaker, Zainab Tufeshi. Zainab is a sociologist. She teaches at UNC. She's also visiting at Princeton at the moment. She's been over at Harvard's Berkman Center. For those of you who hang out with us at Center for Civic Media, you've met her a couple of times. She's come in and given a couple of talks. Zainab started working on these questions of media and social change, looking at the Arab Spring, looking at Tunisia, looking at Egypt, and then this same sort of disruptive social media-connected protest came to her native Turkey. And she has now been going back and forth between the U.S. and Turkey, trying to understand all that's been going on. She just flew in from Turkey, boy are her arms tired. We are so happy to have her here. Zainab Tufeshi. Thank you, everyone. I apologize for being late because I really did fly in yesterday and I tried to get some sleep so I would be coherent. We shall see. This is a new talk and I am trying to wrap my mind around some of the effects of the open internet in the case of Turkey and it's just been a fascinating journey. Now, I'm going to have to take this back a little bit to before the Gizi protests to explain how a citizen journalism network started in Turkey and how it evolved. So the first case I have to tell you to make sense of all of this is a story that starts about a year before Gizi protests when Turkish military jets under murky conditions bombed a group of smugglers between the Iraq and Turkey border. Who were actually doing their, you know, it's kind of hard to wrap our mind around this but their regular smuggling run which they do routinely and this is in fact a village that is paid by the government to be what's called village guards so they were in good terms with the local military and the local police and they waved at them and said, hey, we're going on our smuggling run because that's just the way it's done except this time something went wrong, something went all right and the smugglers were bombed by jets. It was a horrible thing, 34 people died, most of them in their teens, most of them from one or two families, it was just horrific. What happened is that the Turkish media knew of this and sat on the story because they were waiting for the government to tell them what to say. The old newsrooms knew the story, they all were sitting on it, they were all getting news and reports from this because Kurds also have their own media, this was not secret, they were all sitting on it. The media censorship in Turkey is complicated, it's a mix of self-censorship, corporate ownership of media that is aimed at getting government contracts and government pressure. One journalist, Sardar Akunan, who was in the newsroom and just watching this be censored, he just couldn't take it, he was like I can't take this, I just can't sit on this. He purchased a plane ticket with his own money, he told me. He went to the nearby airport and he got on a taxi and he just went there and found this enormous scene of this is a picture he put on Instagram of the snaking coffins of the people who had been blown up and he broke the story basically to the Turkish side. The Kurds had been hearing about it, they have their own media, they also have social media and this was a huge shock because I mean here was a so clear act of censorship and the pictures and the interviews, I think he put this on Instagram, I mean it's kind of crazy in other countries you have here's my lunch and in Turkey here's the snaking coffins. After he broke this, this was just a striking wake up call to lots of people in the Turkish side especially young people who had not grown up in the 90s where the Kurdish-Turkish war was a lot more bloodier and this is Sardar on your top, your left, this is like his pictures from the area, you can see how distraught he is and three young men later joined by others in their early 20s were just like they were shocked, they were really shocked that they had been subjected to the censorship and they said let's do something. They told me there might have been a little bit of alcohol involved, they were like drinking together and saying can't we do anything, can't we do anything and they decided to form a citizen journalism network. In one evening they said let's just do this, they got a Twitter account 140 journals and somebody sat and designed a goofy bird for them and there they were, just a bunch of young college students. They started going around doing what they thought they could do to do journalism, they started going around and interviewing people from wherever something was happening, you know this is Jem and this is Engin, they're just going to trials of you know journalists or they're going to trials of, they're going to protest, they just went all around the country trying to get news. At this time I had already met them and I was talking with them and I said you guys aren't really doing citizen journalism, you're doing journalistic citizenship, you're just you know being journalist and reporting, they were like what can we do, you know we're just trying to get the news out and it's not being reported so they were doing their own thing. There were a couple more incidents in which they were crucial, ended up being crucial in breaking news because journalists who were censored started pirating their news to them. Their own outlets wouldn't publish them so they would go to 140 journals and you know they sort of started building this network and then the Gezi protests happened. You might know this story, the Gezi protests were in response to the government's plan for a park in the middle of one of Turkey's sort of liveliest districts, the government decided they were going to put, let's see, the replica of an Ottoman era barracks that at once stood there and turned it into a shopping mall shaped like the Ottoman barracks. I mean it's just, it was the craziest plan and it was this little bit of park and it was just going to destroy the fabric of that neighborhood. There were huge protests and I've written about this in many places. The government, I'm sorry, the mass media once again sat on the news. Now when they sat on the news in the Kurdish areas it took someone from the Turkish sort of press going there and breaking the story. When you're sitting on a story that's happening in Taksim, that's kind of like sitting on a story that's happening on Times Square. It's kind of hard to sit on that one like that. What happened was tons of people heard of this on social media. I went there during the protests. I interviewed hundreds of people. I asked again and again, where'd you hear this, Twitter? Where'd you hear this, Twitter? SMS, Twitter, WhatsApp, Twitter, some Facebook, lots of Twitter. So people just showed up and this became this huge protest. It became so huge that on your right you can see CNN International is covering it live. On your left is Turkish CNN showing a documentary on penguins at the same time. So while CNN International is live from Taksim, CNN Turkey was showing a documentary on penguins. This became like the symbol of how crazy media censorship was. Somebody just put their two screens together and tweeted this out and penguins became the symbol of the protest. So people started photoshopping penguins into everything. Sort of like, come CNN, it was like called CNN baiting. You're trying to just put a picture in penguins. So hoping CNN would cover this, it just became this joke, right? You saw penguins were the theme. I've documented this myself, right? This is what's happening at the same time. People are being gassed in the Istiklal street, which is right next to where the protests were. This is what's on CNN. I mean, this is just, this kind of censorship was so blatant. So penguin media versus non penguin media became the symbol. You know, Twitter with the gas mask because we're getting gassed all the time and the penguin with the resisting. It just, these became the symbols of the protest because media censorship was a huge part of what people were protesting to begin with. So this is, you know, this was a graffiti from Turkey during Gezi. The revolution will be tweeted. That was the mindset. And this also, this is, there was actually a humor mask, very coincidentally called penguin. And there's a wonderful sort of humor illustrator, Sal Cigardem, he drew the sort of kind of bam, like, and this became the symbol. And that means resist, which is in Turkish connotes like occupy. So I went to Gezi Park. I went there to talk to people. I went there to interview people. And when I, you know, I just went around with my helmet because the tear gas, it's just un-noise, it doesn't kill you. But if it hits your head, that's dangerous. And given how I make a living, I had to, you know, I went there with my bike helmet. And people are asking, weren't you scared? I was like, yes, the cab ride from the taxi, you know, from the airport to the park with no seat belts and just rushing through, that wasn't fun. But other than that, I think it wasn't too bad. So what I found was the citizen journalism as culture. People were, like, I would interview people and I would say, so what do you do when you hear something and you're not sure what's happening? And you would say, well, I go to the front lines. People would go like somebody showed me like a wound they got because they were trying to report from it. There was this enormous sort of, before 104 journals used to have to go places to report. With GIZZY, what we got was this, you know, as soon as something happened, people started taking out their phones, whatever the heck they had, and reporting. And after GIZZY protests, they're just sort of organizing citizen journalism became much easier because the culture changed and people started reporting. Like, you know, you see the guy, he pulls out his iPad. This is such a common thing. But, so this is so far, it reads like a regular story, mass media science, there's 140 journals, they come in, they report. But there's another really interesting twist to this, and this is the part I kind of want to add, is that mass media is often also a tool of culture war. Media control in Turkey, and I would say not only in Turkey, and a lot of other examples, is not just about censoring the news. It's creating polarized identities. It's creating a sense of culture comf around which you build political bases. This is not untrue in the US, right? You can't talk about, say, saying gun laws because it's become part of this culture war. Global warming has become part of culture war identity. And, you know, helpfully, that sort of, that culture war of, you know, elites versus the heartland kind of cultural identity gets attached to lower taxes, less public services, and that is the sort of vision through which a lot of ruling and governance happens. In Turkey, this is very, very strong. The Turkish polarization is happening through, the media control is not just about censorship, and it can't be at the, in the age of internet, it's much harder to maintain this. But what's happening is that they are, the media control is a way of portraying and demonizing and dividing the two camps through which the current government continues to rule. Now, Gizipark was a major challenge to this because it was a very multicultural space. It was, I mean, besides the fact that it broke censorship, it was this amazing meeting of a lot of groups that had been uncomfortable about the government but were divided internally, the opposition too was divided by these culture wars. So these are some pictures I took at Gizipark. And so on your left is one of Turkey's most well-known transgender activists. And she became kind of a hero in Gizipark because the park is near the neighborhood where Turkey's LGBT community lives, and she sat in front of an APC and stopped it, and there were pictures of this so she became famous. On your right is what we call an anti from the Kurdish heartland. And I just saw them find each other. The Kurdish anti, as we call them, went to her in her thick Kurdish accent and said, why haven't we talked together before? Why didn't we not have this? And then the transgender activists, and she was like, yes, why haven't we, and they hugged and they cried. And then I said, can I take a picture? They were like, sure. So, I mean, this is not the kind of cultural groups that would normally come together in Turkey. This is another picture I took. Sort of an elderly woman with the head scarf, her traditional clothes came by and just started, I was just talking to these bunch of kids, she just started crying. She said, I can't stand the way they're gassing you. She was just crying because these were being gassed. And one of the young women I was sitting with, I'm not, you know, you can't see her face. She has tattoos, piercings, she's wearing shorts. I mean, again, cultural wars. And they just consult her. Another example on your front is revolutionary Muslims praying on the back is the sort of a small socialist party protecting them. This was sort of, gassy was very anti-cultural camp. And that was a big threat. So what happened was, government's response was an all-out culture war on mass media. I'm gonna explain how this ties back to citizen journalism. This was really a weird case in which the government claimed that the gassy protesters had beaten up women wearing a hot hat scarf and her baby. They claimed that 150, she claimed that 150 bare-chested, leather pant wearing men had cornered her in the middle of one of the most crowded places and had beaten her up and urinated on her. This was just incredible claim. Now this was really, like the government's really smart because for years, feminists in Turkey have been arguing for believe the women, believe the women, believe the women. And, you know, she went out on TV and said this and the government said, do you not believe the women? There are no pictures. There are no sort of other things besides her testimony. So everybody was kind of taken back because it had supposedly happened in one of the most crowded places. I was like, not one picture, nobody. And the idea was mind-blowing. And then this became this huge thing on, this is like Turkish media. Can you accept this insanity? This kind of awfulness. And you see these cartoons, like the Gezi protesters portrayed us, you know, people who beat up head scarf women with their, you know, with their babies. Now the claim, there's a lot of sort of government, has a lot of close circuit TVs all around and finally something leaked. So we now know this is her in 737. This is her three minutes later, she gets in the cab, nothing happened, nothing happened. So this was a blatant lie, but it took one year for that frame to leak out. And for a whole year at every rally, the Turkish prime minister went and said, they beat up women and babies because they're wearing the head scarf. There were other similar untested claims like that. Most of them were contested because of citizen journalism. I'm saying this because this is a major part of the censorship is not censorship per se, right? It's a way of creating a cultural war. So seeing all of this, the Turkish 140 journals group started evolving towards verification, counter polarization and community building. And this is what they've been doing for the past year because since everybody now takes out their phone, it's become easier to break censorship in Turkey. But culture wars and media control as a means of culture wars has not. So here's some of the things that they're doing. This is a verification example where in a little bit after Gizzi, there was a claim, a photograph that a secular organization's building, headquarters in a small town in the Black Sea region had been surrounded by mobs who are threatening to burn the building. Now in the Turkish context, there are examples of this happening, like mobs burning down buildings of opposition. There's a case in Sivas which killed about 37 people. So this is not a crazy idea that this would happen. They were really worried about it and mass media once again wasn't reporting but they couldn't really verify that this was happening because once again, this is a very difficult situation in which if you cry wolf and if you're wrong, then your credibility is damaged. If you're right and you're not reporting it, people may die. And this is the irony of it. This is on the shoulders of 22 year old college students because mass media is not reporting this and they're sitting there thinking, what do we do? We're getting these pictures. So they were really like good. What they did was they did the Google Maps and they identified every shop around this area and they started calling him and say, hey, can you walk to your balcony and hold your phone to the, you know, just out? Can you just like hold the phone? Somebody just called and called and called people till they got somebody to sort of walk out and do this. So it's really interesting how they're doing this verification. They have, I think they have one of the best sort of infrastructure right now. A bunch of college students have, I think one of the best infrastructures for verifying citizen journals and reports. I'm just giving you one example of what they've done. They have a whole area of techniques. They've developed that they could talk for hours and hours and hours on how they verify things and throughout all of Gizzi in which lots of false stuff was circulating, they made one minor mistake. And I think they've made one or two minor mistakes which they immediately correct since then. This is a year of reporting. I don't think mass media has that good a, you know, that mass media doesn't have this good a record. They've taken their verification to election monitoring, right? They started this thing and with this project, this website where you can take election reports from your local precinct, enter them and then verify them. And this is a picture of their first meeting like, you know, one, two, three, four, five people started this massive election monitoring. It's the same kids, it's the same kids, right? And this was just them on Google Hangouts, three of them down there, one whiteboard and they put up the app in a couple of hours and it was just amazing. So what's happening is there's these official ballot boxes per precinct kind of and there's an official count and they've got crowdsource counters so people go and like, this is handwritten so people crowdsource the writing the handwritten one and then they check it's just a great thing and it's mapped onto the Turkish sort of where there's discrepancies, pretty amazing. But they're not just doing that, they're doing this counter polarization reporting. They're going out of their way to report from protests from all sides. So this is a picture that they posted of Islamists who are praying in the Hagia Sophia. That's the old church that was converted into a mosque for a couple hundred years after the Ottoman is invaded Istanbul which was before Constantinople and now it's a museum and there's a desire from the Islamist sort of contingency to make it back into a mosque and they do these weekly prayers there. Hundred and further journals who are more like the secular kids, right? They're not sympathetic necessarily. They say they practice affirmative action. They get up at 4 a.m. which is when the morning prayer is so that they can report on this. In fact, they told me sometimes they just don't go to bed till 4 a.m. and they might be a little hungover. They make sure that they report on this because what they're trying to do is report everybody else's issues, feelings to each other. They are very much on purpose doing counter-polarizing reporting and they tell them it gets really weird. Like they go report on soccer teams and the soccer fans are like yay and then they go report from an LGBT protest and then they're like why? Why are you reporting on gays? And then every time they report something one group says why are you reporting on them? And he says over the years they just kept arguing to everyone you gotta listen to each other. In a culture, in a political system in which culture war is one key way in which you rule, reporting to each other, from each other has become this massive political statement. And sort of let's sort of close the circle to what happened to the... Remember Roboski, the Kurdish village I told you that had gotten banned? The people, the young ones from that village many of them, everybody lost someone, right? The last names of the people who died they're all the same, uncle, cousin, brothers they become citizen journalists. They have themselves have become citizen journalists and they now also work with 140 journalists which started because of them, because of upset. How upset they were, they report on it. So one of them is Farhad Enju. I spoke with them this time around. I went and listened to his story. And it really struck me how this culture war and censorship adds to the polarization. So he was telling me how his dad called him in the middle of the night saying, awful news you know your brother died and everything and Farhad, he was a college student too. And he got on a bus, he got on the first bus in the morning and he's going to his village. And he told me how he was just crying in the bus crying, crying, crying, just devastated and shocked. And there's a television in the bus because in Turkish buses there are televisions. He just kept looking at the television where this wasn't reported. He said there was no reporting, you know it's already some people died, you know military bombed my village and he told me how angry he was. He told me how like devastating it was to sit in that bus for a couple of hours crying and just watching the news not be reported. He also told me how when the Gizi protest first started he was angry. Now that had never occurred to me, to my shame it had never occurred to me that you know someone from a Kurdish background would be angry because I thought they'd be happy that you know the western side of the country was also there was something going on. And he said well you know what I was so angry because they wouldn't listen to us or protest about us and they were protesting about trees. So yeah, I mean I can see why you'd be angry I can really see that. He told me he sort of got over that anger when he started seeing people getting tear gas and beaten up because he's a Kurd, right? If people are being beaten up he's just gonna empathize with it because that's sort of just natural sympathy and they're just you know very good about this. And then he started saying wait I should empathize with these people. Now in Gezi Park I talked to tons of people. I've had young person after young person tell me wait a minute if we're the terrorists and the Kurds were terrorists, wait a minute you could see you know I've had kids tell me that next time there's something in the Kurdish region they're not gonna turn on the television they're gonna check social media they're gonna check 140 journals and now they can also check Kurdish citizen journalists themselves. So this counter polarization through citizen journalism reporting has been so interesting and Farhat now goes all around sometimes reporting you know from non-Kurdish areas he's just got this and these are totally self-funded scrappy things, right? He had this phone that was barely working and it wasn't like he doesn't have the latest phone he doesn't have latest equipment he doesn't have anything. He just has himself and of course doing this he's come under a lot of pressure he was once detained but when he was detained his name trended in Turkey on Twitter because he's also on social media people were so upset that someone who had lost so much would still see government pressure so there was this sort of merger between it wasn't just the Kurds who were outraged a lot of Turks were outraged and he was freed and he told me that his followers are his biggest protection and I said are you afraid? He said no I have what's the number now he said I have you know 20 some thousand followers and some of them are you know big important people in Turkey so I feel more protected and he said if I ever stopped being a citizen journalism they'd probably disappear me that was his word so citizen journalism for him is very important and it's really these are incredible stories they've also become constant check on mass media there was an incident in which a young woman jumped from the Bosphorus Bridge to her death unfortunately and she before jumping she had taken off her clothes so she had jumped nude Turkish press of course covered it so sensationally they published the pictures of her jumping it was just awful her family did not go object about this to the Turkish traditional mass media they went to 140 journals and they just put this they said can you publicize this so the citizen media has become this constant check on mass media's not just non-reporting and awfulness I mean these are just some examples I see like people's tweet to 140 journals so things will get reported and mass media is always following this I talked to a lot of reporters they know that their censorship is gonna be visible now sort of also to wrap up on what else that happened Sardar who had first broken the Robowski story to the Turkish side started something called Vagustv which was going to be like this alternative internet based traditional media so it wasn't gonna be citizen media it was gonna be traditional media they got some funding I talked to the people who did the funding it didn't work it's really interesting that the person he's a great reporter he's an amazing reporter with great journalistic instincts they found the money but their model did not work so he became a beekeeper he gave up after a year of effort now he became a beekeeper and he's raising goats and making cheese it's a huge loss to Turkey I mean that we can't keep our traditional journalists who wanna do good reporting in spite of funding and I talked to the people who funded him and they were like well it just wasn't sustainable you can't make money and the government shuts down your site whereas 140 journals because they're Twitter based they're a lot more protected now next steps what they're doing now I mean this is really interesting they're trying to do creating communities through reporting so they're trying to develop a Twitter based app Twitter based so that they are not subject to government censorship where if you're reporting on something that's not like a national news you have say animal rights they wanna bring together the people who are reporting on animal rights issues and help them create their communities and they're trying to develop these apps of gamification they have all these I talked to these kids and it's like talking to a bunch of little Steve Jobs in the civic space they are so creative and so interesting in their ideas and they've tried so many things but of course there's a problem and this is them this is just us talking the last time around there's no funding this is all done and I have just given you maybe little slice of all that they've done in the past couple of years that there's a lot of other stuff they're doing they are doing this as college students who are going to college who also are doing odd jobs here and there to completely self-finance 140 journals zero funding, negative funding I mean they have to go to school and take exams one of them flunked new media theory he just missed the exam because he was giving he was doing all this this is insane right this is the kind of a 22 year old he flunked it because he was at even talks at Harvard and Princeton by the way that he was out of town on what they were doing so the professor was like no I can't let you do a makeup and flunk them and he says he barely passed when he retook it new media theory but there is just done through this complete scrappy energy adrenaline and they're really smart about things you know you talk to them you know they talk, they develop their own language we keep trying to find words for what they're doing they're like we're not really doing citizen journalism we're going to be doing community building through reporting there's no word for this concept yet they're gonna try I mean it's just counter polarization community building people finding each other their own rules of objectivity that doesn't really map completely I mean they're very very strong on factual and verification but they don't mind people having sort of points of view it's a new model of journalism or reporting or community building whatever you want to call it and just as this is like and after I was talking to them there Jem was like oh I haven't slept in one day and he just like crashed on that yellow sort of pillowy there and just passed out this is a total volunteer effort it's not sustainable like this I mean there's only so many years you can get out of young people because one little hiccup an illness, a problem and you will get into things so and this is my like some of the examples that we have is that we have Center for Civic Media all these things that are being tried I love it the personal democracy forum is starting trying to start like a civic startup in New York which I think is a great idea we really I think need to expand to global it need to expand globally to risky unknown ventures our funding model of funding a little more guaranteed stuff is the opposite of what Silicon Valley does and I'm guessing like Silicon Valley's got a lot of problems but they're so good at just this crazy funding which we laugh at we're like why is everybody funding the crazy stuff well because if you don't fund the crazy stuff you don't get the interesting stuff either right Silicon Valley has this ecology of crazy angel investors and a lot of money and a lot of young people who wanna do something and they do get something done in the end and I've been thinking you know we've been talking about this with Ethan Zuckerman I've been talking about this with Mika Shiffri other people we really need to bring the sort of culture of funding with less strings attached just to this stuff to civic startups to civic media and to third world because that's where a lot of the innovation is occurring right and you know M-Pesa starts in Kenya for a reason there is a need and there's a lot of people who are smart and great and whenever I go to someplace like that I'm just blown away about how much stuff gets done how do we do this? I don't really know because it's a challenging funding environment you can't just fund success and get success because the successful people are already successful cannot fund guaranteed projects if this is gonna work because I assure you 140 journals wasn't the only one that started right so you have to create this and there has to be some failure in experimentation built into how we fund these things I mean things like the night news challenge did 140 journals they applied and got rejected by the way they're trying to develop an application to create this community building and gamification because none of them are programmers and they can't afford to hire a programmer they've been stuck in we can't afford to hire a programmer in the past year so they didn't get funded they're trying because it's harder it's harder to apply from Turkey it's harder to apply the grant making language that you need the success you already need and I don't really have an answer to this but there are so many and this is just one project in Turkey there are right now tons of projects I think this is one of the best I think they're great and really smart but they're not even the only one and I'm guessing other countries have all of this so I just wanted to end on this how do we create a civic startup culture that flourishes all of these besides the few places we have here the civic media center or other places so thank you for your patience listening and I hope you have any questions, comments thank you so much Zed up and please don't go anywhere you can give me the clicker if you want but we're not letting you offstage just yet despite skillfully planning this so that you would avoid Q&A we've squeezed in 10 minutes so I wanted to make sure we could get at least a couple of questions to you while we have you here so those of you please great get hands up and I will start running around with the mic and we won't have time for everybody but we'll see what we can do here and I know that Zed up's around for the rest of the morning if people want to talk I'm here till like I think 4 p.m. I have a 5 p.m. if you have questions just catch me here we go hi there I'm Dana Priest what's been the government's reaction to how you're doing and a lot of journalists have been imprisoned lately in Turkey are they related to 40 journals yes so here's the interesting thing they have not yet faced direct government threats it's an interesting case because part of what they're doing is reporting very very carefully verified things from citizen journalists so and they've been reporting from all sides so that's a little harder for the government to target them but if they get bigger and more successful that's a real issue for them but because they're also on Twitter see the Turkish government the censorship in Turkey on places like also Russia right it's not always it's not the censorship is very much also self censorship by the main media corporations the number of jail journalists there's a lot of sort of contested numbers there and it certainly happens right the Turkish government does jail some journalists but to be honest the bigger problem is that there is no media corporate media in which journalists are free that is a much bigger problem and that happens by the government pressuring the media corporations and also industrial sort of big industrial conglomerates go by media and then they use the media as a means to curry favor with the government so that really is like rather than being jailed being pressured it's kind of like the Putin's way of getting NGOs because the radiator needs to be three inches from the wall and it's two and a half inches right and then you're shut down that's what's been happening since they're just scrappy little startup on Twitter they're harder to pressure that way and they're not breaking any laws very carefully they're not breaking any laws in Turkey there's not really major laws against reporting a lot of things a lot of it is just sort of the government I mean we know the things that have been leaked that the government the prime minister personally telephones heads of mass media organizations in Turkey when he doesn't like the ticker he calls and says I don't like your ticker and the guy on the other end says yes sir and he admitted he made this call so this is like this audio leaked and it was like of course I call I didn't like the ticker you know I have a right to call when I don't like the ticker so that's how the censorship is occurring and they wouldn't listen if you called them and said take off your thing so they're kind of protected by not being very institutional not being in this for the money now if they really like if they made a mistake you know they could get sued under personal defamation and all of other things and so far that's what's going on my name is Tanta Palaga I'm from Romania Eastern Europe we closely watched what is happening in Turkey and in Ukraine and the way the governments is censoring the information and I would like you to elaborate a little bit about how the government is cutting off the access to Twitter YouTube to internet specific websites with disseminating information is criticizing the government because this is I think very interesting and another additional question if you can explain a little bit how they do it they are calling directly the companies the phone companies or what they do I got so this is a very interesting it's a great question because see as far as I can tell in the world there are three and a half models of internet censorship one is China and I think Rebecca's in the room again yeah so you can read all about it from her it's an amazing infrastructure right you have your tech scene you have your direct access to the government has direct access to Weibo and you have to have been China to do that you needed to have started 20 years ago with that kind of foresight so Turkey's not doing it like China one the health model is North Korea right just have no internet except know who the heck wants to be North Korea nobody on the planet besides North Korea wants to be North Korea so Turkey doesn't want to be North Korea Turkey has one of the most amazing useful e-government infrastructures in the world it's better than the US hands down this government cannot operate without the internet everything you do with the government you know if you have a primary care doctor through the government's health insurance you use the internet to make your appointment that is partly why the government's popular they have used the internet to create this amazing infrastructure that makes life much more convenient so there's no way they can unplug the internet they would you know they just that's not gonna work so what do they do they go after these platforms except that doesn't terribly work either because when they went after Twitter what happened was people just got around the block you can use a VPN since they can't unplug the internet it's not very easy but it did slow down access to Twitter right so if you had to go through a VPN it slowed down access which was a major problem for people but in time that would have gotten solved people would start getting you know paid VPNs and things so people would likely have solved that problem so you can't really censor that so what do they do they make it part of the culture conf they make it part of culture wars the prime minister goes on TV all the time and says Twitter is where there's porn and anti-family values and lies and it will defame you it will break up your family what they're doing in Turkey and I see this like I wrote this up as soon as I wrote this up like people from around the world started saying my government too Indonesia you know I'm Malaysia every lots of places are going this third way which is demonizing social media so your own base stays off it so that you can go continue your culture war because unless you're China it's really not possible to do this massive filter it's just not gonna work attacking you know YouTube they block YouTube and the government's base why you know the date there's a lot of popular cartoons in Turkey that they use YouTube to make you know let their kids watch that stuff they were not happy about it you know the government's own base was like I wanna watch Caillou and Pepe and what the heck and also Turks I really got circumvention because the government's been blocking porn sites for years and there's no better training in circumvention apparently especially in the Middle East it's like everybody knew how to circumvent so circumvention is well understood very widespread you know whether it's to get to porn sites or to watch Caillou cartoons like you know grandmas know how to change their DNS setting so that the kid can watch Caillou I'm not kidding so it's the blocking doesn't totally work but you can slow down throttle and you can make it part of the culture war you see this in country after country where people go and like leaders go and say internet is awful, ugly, evil, Azerbaijan does this what happens is that their own base stays off Twitter it's not that Twitter stays unaccessible so it's really important for Silicon Valley to sort of understand this and kind of figure out what they do in response they're gonna be demonized they have to be careful they have to have their help pages in Turkish they have to like localize without giving in to the sort of just in the censorship per se it's a complicated long story and I think this is what we're going to see in a lot of places is this demonization, throttling, culture war in which internet is part of it the prime minister famously doing this at Twitter is a minister society and that's what he meant So the wonderful thing about bringing top academics to the stage is that you get answers to questions you never expected to have answers to I now know who actually watches Caillou I have to say I'm a parent of a four and a half year old I never thought there was an audience it's in Turkey Huge audience This is important for me to know Xenia incredibly helpful Thank you so much for inviting me I'm so glad you're gonna be around for the rest of the day I hope people will seek Xenia out over lunch over breaks we don't actually have breaks but if we did you would find her then and in the meantime a round of applause to thank her Thank you Thank you so much for inviting me