How do we make the Guardian a better place for conversation?

Online abuse pollutes the water in which we all swim. As the Guardian’s first female editor, it is important to me that we tackle it

Last year, a few weeks before I started as the new editor-in-chief of the Guardian, I read a review in the New York Times of Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. The book looks at the emergence of public humiliations on social media, and the review ended by saying that “the actual problem is that none of the men running those bazillion-dollar internet companies can think of one single thing to do about all the men who send women death threats”. Since I was about to become the first woman to run the Guardian (not, sad to say, a bazillion-dollar internet company), I decided that I had a responsibility to try to do something about it.

That’s why, over the past two weeks, the Guardian has published a series of articles looking at online abuse, with more to follow in the coming months. You might have read our interview with Monica Lewinsky in which she described the trauma of being subjected to what could be called the first great internet shaming, and how she still has to think of the consequences of talking about her past – whether by misspeaking, she could trigger a whole new round of abuse.

Published By - Theguardian.com - Sports New, LifeStyle News, Politics news, UK and world political comment and analysis: Friday 22 April 2016 14.00 BST

Police and tech firms are failing to tackle trolling, says Stella Creasy

Labour MP, who was a target of online abuse, says authorities and web companies need to use their resources to tackle issue Trolling is still not being taken seriously enough by police and technology companies who already have the tools to take action against internet abusers, the Labour MP Stella Creasy has said.Creasy, who was targeted three years ago by one of the most high-profile Twitter trolls to be jailed, said the key to dealing with online abuse was challenging the underlying inequality, misogyny and prejudice that fuels the problem. Continue .......

Published By - Theguardian.com - Tech news, Politics news, UK and world political comment and analysis - Friday 15 April 2016 14.31

GreatFire activist urges western firms to help end Chinese censorship

Western companies 

The Western companies need to end their hypocrisy over free speech in China, and start helping to end censorship in the country. The co-founders of GreatFire, an organisation dedicated to fighting the so-called Great Firewall of China. 

So the technological heart of state censorship in the country, said it hurts to see companies such as Apple citing Chinese censorship in their battles with western governments, while co-operating with authoritarian state in order to earn money from its burgeoning middle classes and take advantage of its enormous manufacturing base.

But technology firms, including Apple, often cite China when arguing with western states about repressive internet restrictions. So instead working hand-in-glove with the Chinese state o profit from the country’s vast internal market. He also praised Google for their decision in 2010 to stop censoring search results and pull out of mainland China.

Censorship

The Google was tempered with caution, however, due to reports that the company might be re-entering the Chinese market to sell smartphone apps through the Play Store. (What is that going to involve?) he asked. So i think people are going to be very wary and attentive to how Google goes back into China. And hopefully they’re going to show us that there is a way to go back in without having to censor.

So Play Store is particularly sensitive, because it’s one of the primary outlets through which GreatFire works, releasing anti-censorship tools such as FreeBrowser. So the group was founded in 2011 to raise awareness about the Great Firewall of China, primarily through cataloguing which sites were blocked internally In recent years. Unlike most previous sites censored by the state.

Important there are sites that are too valuable for the authorities to block, mainly for economic reasons, He says. So that’s when we started to work on this strategy of collateral freedom. So the GreatFire used the collateral freedom approach to develop apps, as well as post uncensored content on cloud services such as Amazon’s AWS, where it could not be blocked by the Chinese authorities without taking down vast swathes of the net.

Issue Companies

Most other companies weren’t as eager as Github and Amazon to help GreatFire. In October 2013, the group finished its FreeWeibo app, which archives posts that have been removed from Weibo, China’s Twitter. He said. It was available on the app store, people could download it and the app could be updated. And we kinda got round all the restrictions that the authorities put in place there. Important company Apple said yes. And it was gone and that was it.

So Apple’s are why Smith says he has an issue with companies citing China when arguing against repressive government measures in the west. For instance, in its battle with the FBI over whether it could be forced to weaken the security on its own hardware, Apple repeatedly brought up China. But UK, arguments against the (snooper’s charter), a bill that gives the British government huge power to eavesdrop on encrypted connections, have also been made with regard to China. The bill, some worry, would embolden the country to demand its own repressive changes.

So at least, have changed in the three years GreatFire has been chipping away at the Great Firewall. Not always for the better: In 2015, the censorship authorities, So apparently realising that the collateral freedom approach was bearing fruit, switched tactics, turning on what was described as the (Great Cannon). So that is a  modified version of a conventional hacking tactic known as a (distributed denial of service) attack. But cannon was pointed at Github and at GreatFire’s Amazon hosting. 

He said, (over soon) doesn’t necessarily mean China dropping its web censorship. But Smith sees two ways the standoff can end: (So one possibility is that the state eventually gets over its fear of what the people would do if they saw the real internet). Often That’s not going to have a revolutionary outcome though.

So the other possibility is that the (collateral freedom) approach fails, and the country drops the firewall still further, blocking sites such as Github and Amazon. So even that would be a victory of sorts, pushing the country into a direct standoff with its people, and economic success.