Evgeny Morozov studies the political and social aspects of the Internet and technology. He’s mostly known for writing a book ‘’The Net Delusion: The Dark Side Of Internet Freedom’’. Morozov expresses critical point of view on few issues that we can observe on the Internet, especially among political context.
Firstly, he writes about idea that Internet can be used as a tool to spread democracy.
This statement is accurate, we can definitely remark many sites and groups that are known for spreading democracy around the Internet. For example, one of this site is http://www.ned.org.
National Endowment for Democracy as they say is a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. Each year NED supports more than 1,000 projects of non-governmental groups abroad that are working for democratic goals in more than 90 countries. Another example is polish site, http://www.wid.org.pl. The Freedom and Democracy Foundation is primarily focused on issues of human rights and democracy. Foundation's activities are financed from grants from various state institutions, as well as from private donations.
Aim of the Foundation is to use and popularize Polish experiences of successful struggle for independence, democracy and human rights.
Taking Facebook into consideration, there is a group Democracy Challenge that supposes to encourage people to talk and express their feelings about democracy around the world. I don’t believe that such sites will make a miracle and democracy will appear for example in Palestine. Because statistics show that among youth in that country, their opinion is that a military government runs the best political system.
But for sure it spreads awareness about such system as democracy or human rights. Sometimes it is the only way people might educate on different options and issues. What is important Morozov points out that Twitter or FB may spread information and encourage people to choose democracy but it may also work the other way. These tools can be dangerous. He writes about tendencies, which we can observe, that people think Internet is going to solve every problem without consequences.
We need to remember how powerful is the Internet. I can bring up the case of Anonymous, a group of hacktivist. When popular file-sharing site MegaUpload was shut down they hacked and shut down sites for FBI, Broadcast Music or MPAA.
Later there was a case with ACTA, which was an international agreement, aimed to establish an international legal framework for targeting goods, generic medicines and copyright infringement on the Internet. Anonymous began a war with governments around the world that have signed the agreement. I remember that all of my friends were also involved, Google got involved as well as Wikipedia. Everyone was fighting for the ‘’freedom of Internet’’. With that power, month’s later politician David Martin made a recommendation against the treaty. After that European Parliament rejected the agreement of ACTA.
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