Global Voices

Open Letter to Facebook
Posted on June 16, 2011 by tanja

Re: Protests against Policy Brutality in Macedonia (June 2011)

Dear Facebook,

We are writing to express our concern over the swift deletion policy that has been imposed on the facebook pages and events that we as participants in a protest against policy brutality in Macedonia are currently dealing with. We have been made aware by the press secretary for the Ministry of Interior that their administrators are responsible for reporting the groups for calls for violence and hate speech, but considering that we know the content of those pages and deny the allegations made by press secretary Kotevski, we wonder how your administrators confirm those allegations before you delete the pages. Do you confirm them at all?

The systematic deletion especially of events that bring people together in peaceful protests adds significantly to the climate of fear created by those we are protesting against, so we felt compelled to explain a few things which we hope you will take into consideration next time you receive a request from the Macedonian Ministry of Interior to kill one of our events or pages. We will try to explain in brief the background of the protests, as well as the nature of the protests with the hope that someone out there will realize how detrimental your policies are for our peaceful, non-violent cause.

Background:

In the early hours of June 6th, shortly after midnight, a 22-year-old boy was beaten to death on the…

> Does anyone know of any other incidents that make case against centralized servers?

Yes. Many of these are undemocratic, but others are merely unintentional problems of reliability induced by a single point of failure.

http://www.delicious.com/kragen/decentralization-stories has a few dozen items up through 2008.

http://beckyzoole.livejournal.com/395310.html
livejournal users want more control of livejournal. decentralization-stories

omg decentralization-stories:
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/when-google-owns-you/
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/google-gets-back-to-nick/

http://valleywag.com/5053704/kentucky-judge-moves-to-seize-gambling-sites-domains
more decentralization-stories: caribbeangold.com, etc., censored

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341378
more decentralization-stories: legal intimidation takes a site offline

http://blog.wikiring.com/Blog/BlogEntry28
decentralization-stories: the TWiki Takeover

http://norayounis.com/2008/11/04/308
The impressive flickr account of blogger and friend Hossam el-Hamalawy
is facing censorship by flickr themselves! First they disabled
pro-palestine photos he had taken in Ireland, then they started
searching their old drawers for reasons to un-list his account from
public search.
decentralization-stories

http://arabist.net/arabawy/2008/11/04/flick-censors-my-account/
more details. ugly. decentralization-stories

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/11/05/support-the-arabist/
global voices picks it…

This is fake. While the ANC government is not perfect and there is a TON of things they do wrong, corruption etc.

This is probably right wing extremist nonsense to drum up support since we have an election year coming up. Also to make those 'traitors' who vote for the 'blacks' feel guilty.

I covered a group that seem to have very racist views a while back for global voices:

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/03/02/south-africa-kommandokorp-extremist-hate-group-or-afrikaner-nationalism/

I wouldn't be surprised if a group like this put this out. The goal is use fear, to brainwash.

The real sad part, is in a country of 50m, we only have about 8m tax payers, people are uneducated. Rather than focusing on 'the other people' and drumming up fear! we should be trying to fix this country, looking to government to fix it wont work. We all need to do it.

Also, if you have never experienced apartheid, let me tell you this it was the most demeaning and horrible system. I grew up during the tail end of it. One of very few memories that i STILL have to this day before the age of 10, was cops threatening to throw us into jail, swearing us in a language, then proceeding to escort us off the beach, merely because we were on the wrong side of the beach, and because of the colour of our skin. My sisters were younger than me we all still remember this incident.

Think about that for a second...

Have you looked at Japanese websites? Most of them have pretty terrible design/UI. It's the same thing.

My take on this is that you have to look more broadly to understand the tendency for cluttered design in Japanese interfaces. Walk around a small neighbourhood in Tokyo and you'll see how cluttered the layout is. On small "roji" (back alleyways), Japanese like to stack potted plants outside their front doors in a pretty disorganized arrangement. Streets are generally not straight, neighbourhoods rarely follow a grid layout.

(Shimokitazawa is probably the best example in Tokyo of this: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/11/04/japan-debating-the-fate-of-shimokitazawa/ )

It's the same thing with cluttered interface design, except that whereas in urban layout it produces something amazingly complex, intricate and fascinating to explore, in UI design it just results in frustration and inefficiency. But I'm convinced the two come from the same source, and that you can't entirely separate them.

The beautifully designed interiors you mention come from a completely different place (mentally, not physically). I don't quite know how to reconcile the fact that the two come from the same country/culture, but I do believe they have both been here for a long long time. It's just that software somehow tends to bring out the former, whereas monozukuri brings out the latter.

It is a classical Russian propaganda defense: answer an accusation on human rights violations with "and you are lynching Negroes" or similar.

See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes ,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

Kremlin is paying bloggers and commenters in Russia to post positive things about authorities:

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/06/10/russia-networks-of-paid-bloggers-exposed/ ,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/07/hacked-emails-nashi-putin-bloggers

Russian authorities may also be paying or employing some users of HN.

That's how I get it. I was expecting to find the "lynching Negroes" comment upvoted high by just seeing the title. It does not mean that the user who posted it is employed by Kremlin, but you know, the message will be upvoted...

False captioning seems to be too easy to trace today with google image search and the general availability of photo materials in the Internet.

For example in the current conflict in Ukraine, Russian media has employed a lot of fakery, but the overwhelming majority of the times they were caught, they used false captioning.

Today it seems that no one will believe a clumsy photoshot jobs, however false captioning is potent as ever.

For examples see these sources:

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/03/05/ukraines-activists-debunk-russian-myths-on-crimea/

http://www.stopfake.org/en/