The Open Society Institute and Asia Society host an event with Open Society Fellows Rebecca MacKinnon and Evgeny Morozov exploring the changing landscape of Internet censorship. Special attention is given to the techniques employed by governments to co-opt and steer online discussions in ideologically convenient directions.
Focusing on the specific cases of Russia and China, the panelists discuss how the strategies and tools of control, manipulation, and censorship have evolved in both countries.
Isabel Hilton, editor of China Dialogue and an Open Society Fellowship selection committee member, moderates the discussion.
Bio
Rebecca MacKinnon
Rebecca MacKinnon is a former CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo, before leaving television to become a blogger and co-founder of Global Voices Online.
She is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Center and lives in Hong Kong. From 2004-06 she was a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Evgeny Morozov
Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. He is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine's "Net Effect" blog about the Internet's impact on global politics.
Evgeny Morozov is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. He was formerly a Yahoo! fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and a fellow at George Soros's Open Society Institute, where he remains on the board of the Information Program.
Previously, he was Director of New Media at the Prague-based NGO Transitions Online (TOL) and a columnist for the Russian newspaper Akzia. He is also on the sub-board of the Information Program of the Open Society Institute.
Morozov's writings have appeared in many publications, including The Economist, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The International Herald Tribune.
Right, as stated in the 1st and 14th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, to express information, ideas, and opinions free of government restrictions based on content. A modern legal test of the legitimacy of proposed restrictions on freedom of speech was stated in the opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Schenk v. U.S. (1919): a restriction is legitimate only if the speech in question poses a clear and present dangeri.e., a risk or threat to safety or to other public interests that is serious and imminent. Many cases involving freedom of speech and of the press also have concerned defamation, obscenity, and prior restraint (seePentagon Papers). See alsocensorship.