All Blog Posts from Public Eye

It’s a YouTube world and we’re just living in it. This much is clear, as the Web site seems to find a new way to generate media buzz every day. Take a look at these recent samplings…

Andy Warhol Online:

We’ve had Obama Girl. We’ve had Britney-loving weeper Chris Crocker. (That's 'him' above.) Now we’ve got a woman singing with her hands? According to the Canadian Globe and Mail, an odd-even-given-the-company-it-keeps video showing a pair of hands ‘singing’/grooving to a Daft Punk song is the flavor of the week.

Ad Nauseam:

Google’s ad network and YouTube are teaming up to spread advertising around the web. According to the New York Times:

The Internet search giant is expected to introduce a service on Tuesday to allow Web sites in its ad network to embed relevant videos from some YouTube content creators. A Web site or blog specializing in hiking, for instance, might choose to embed hiking videos from YouTube.

Just another example that wherever you are online, commerce is going to find you … somewhere, somehow.

Off The Radar, On Computer Screens:

You can’t find Al Jazeera English on most American cable providers, but you now can find them online via YouTube. TechCrunch reports that Al Jazeera has signed a deal where they share advertising revenue with the website.

Online search engine-slash-titan Google announced the other night that they are going to add a new feature to their (in my mind, peerless) news page: Comments from those people mentioned within the stories. According to their statement:

We'll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we'll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as "comments" so readers know it's the individual's perspective, rather than part of a journalist's report.

At first blush, this sounds great. Let’s get the information straight from the horse’s mouth. If there is more to the story, let’s hear it out.

But this new tactic brings a substantial “caveat emptor” to the process. After all, part of the journalist’s job is to cull out the wheat from the chaff, to find out where the “news” is in a story. Sure, you and I may disagree on what the pull quote was from the other night’s Democratic ‘Forum.’ (Really? Hillary Clinton said “I’m your girl?” That’s all we get from the 90-minute discussion?) But without the journalist attempting to boil down a speech or an issue to a couple hundred words, we’re back where we started.

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We can pretty much all agree that the Internet, including blogs, played a pretty large role in exposing the Mark Foley scandal. Score one for the good guys in this case. But even in the midst of this story comes another reminder that the Web could be changing our politics in ways that aren’t necessarily for the better. We’ve previously explored the downside of a world in which politicians are stalked by video cameras to catch every single word they utter and involuntary tick they suffer from. Now, Google’s Eric Schmidt says the Internet giant may enable everyone to instantly fact-check our candidates and leaders. Via Reuters:

Imagine being able to check instantly whether or not statements made by politicians were correct. That is the sort of service Google Inc. boss Eric Schmidt believes the Internet will offer within five years.

Politicians have yet to appreciate the impact of the online world, which will also affect the outcome of elections, Schmidt said in an interview with the Financial Times published on Wednesday.

He predicted that "truth predictor" software would, within five years, "hold politicians to account." People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.

"One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting 'is this true or false.' We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability," he told the newspaper.

Hey, it sounds great doesn’t it? We’ll really have those slick politicians where we want them now. But much like the YouTube phenomenon might likely produce a generation of even more-refined political robots, this “truth predictor” may end up only hurting the system.

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Speaking of China, I wanted to bring your attention to a Frontline documentary that discusses the economic, political and social reality of today's China. You can watch the whole thing here, and I would highly recommend doing so, as well as clicking around the above linked Web site.

For our purposes here at Public Eye, I want to focus on the program's discussion of the way in which the Chinese state controls information, and the willingness of some American companies to submit to their demands. Take Google, for example, which has built into the Chinese version of its search engine software which censors results. Consider the iconic image of "Tank Man," the man who stood in front of a row of tanks during the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. The image became an inspiration to people around the world, a symbol of the individual standing up for himself in the face of overwhelming oppression.

If you type "Tiananmen Square" into the Google and do an image search, you get image after image of Tank Man. But do the same in the Chinese version of Google, and Tank Man is nowhere to be seen – instead you get pictures of the square, shots of smiling tourists, and maps. (One result showing the massacre did seem to get through, though Chinese users attempting to click through to these images are unable to do so.) One of the saddest scenes in the Frontline report involved an interviewer showing the image of Tank Man to a group of Beijing university students, who had no idea what it was. One thought it might be a parade. It is estimated that almost no one in China under 20 years old has ever seen the image.

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Google News may be where more and more people are turning to get their news these days, but is it also a site more and more are learning to manipulate? Christian Science Monitor’s Randy Dotinga asks the question in an article today:

When a New Jersey teenager decided to create a fictional story about being hired by one of the Internet's largest companies, he knew just where to spread the news - with the unwitting help of the company itself.

Earlier this month, Thomas Vendetta submitted his fake press release about being hired by Google to Google News, a popular site that automatically trolls 4,500 sources for their latest posts. Sure enough, the release appeared on the world's most popular website for news.

The incident, while unusual, illustrates the hazards of Google's automated approach to picking news stories. And it throws an odd spotlight on an entire industry that has sprouted up to ensure that their clients' press releases pop up next to stories from major newspapers when users of Google or Yahoo go trolling for news.

Are these "aggregators" providing the news - or are they diluting it with the fakery, hucksterism, and puffery that affects the rest of the Internet?

The answer, according to Dotinga’s article, is – buyer beware:

Ultimately, anyone who uses the news aggregation sites should consider the advice of Thomas Vendetta, the New Jersey teenager who wasn't actually hired by Google: "You're free to believe what you want, but be careful what you do believe."

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In America, where Google is fighting the Justice Department's efforts to secure the company's records of its users search habits, it might look like Internet companies consider keeping private information about users a significant priority. But while the Internet may be global, that corporate philosophy is decidedly not.

Yahoo is now being accused of providing Chinese authorities with information that led to the arrest of writer Li Zhi. His efforts to join the China Democracy Party, Reuters reports, have landed him an eight year prison sentence for "inciting subversion." In September, Yahoo was hammered for allegedly helping Chinese authorities identify Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who was accused of "illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities" and sentenced to ten years in prison. He reportedly sent an email summarizing an internal Communist Party directive to a foreign source using a Yahoo email account. The company provided the Chinese government with his account holder information.

Now the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders are calling on Yahoo to disclose what information it has turned over to the Chinese government. They want to know how many Chinese citizens have gone to jail on the basis of information provided by Yahoo. "Now we know Yahoo works regularly and efficiently with the Chinese police," Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

Yahoo argues that it has no choice but to comply with Chinese authorities, and that it's ultimately for the greater good. "The choice is not whether to comply with law enforcement demands for information. The choice is whether to remain in the country. We believe that the Internet is a positive force in China," said Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako, who added that Yahoo was "distressed" by the details of the Shi Tao case.

Erick Schonfeld is skeptical of that logic. "…where are the proof points of "positive force" that counterbalance what's been done to Shi Tao or Li Zhi?," he writes. "Each jailed dissident convicted based on information Yahoo (or Google or Microsoft or any American company) gave to the Chinese government belies the notion of the Internet ultimately being good for China." He adds: "It's one thing to comply with the law in foreign countries. It is another to become a surveillance arm in those countries or to be complicit in censoring their citizens."

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