As a CITP fellow last year, one of my goals was to get a new project on digital activism off the ground. With support from the US Institutes of Peace and a distributed network of researchers we pulled together an event dataset of hundreds of instances where people tried using information and communication technologies to achieve […]
Are There Countries Whose Situations Worsened with the Arrival of the Internet?
April 18, 2013 by
Are there countries whose situations worsened with the arrival of the internet? I’ve been arguing that there are lots of examples of countries where technology diffusion has helped democratic institutions deepen. And there are several examples of countries where technology diffusion has been part of the story of rapid democratic transition. But there are no […]
Singapore Punishes Net Freedom Advocate
March 7, 2013 by
Over the last few days my activist self has come out. I was a tenure reviewer for Dr. Cherian George at Nanyang Technical University, one of Singapore’s most high-profile universities. His tenure case was overturned at the top, where university administration meets the country’s political elites. It is difficult to dismiss George on the basis […]
Now Available in Print and eBook: "Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring"
March 1, 2013 by
I am happy to announce that my new book, co-authored with Muzammil M. Hussain, is now available in print (Oxford University Press, Amazon, Google Books) and eBook (Kindle). In April of last year, I presented some of our initial findings and described the methodology in a presentation at the Center for Information Technology at Princeton. […]
Personal Democracy Robots?
January 22, 2013 by
A few weeks ago I wrote a post for Slate arguing that it is time to consider developing—and maybe even using—democracy robots on Twitter. Preprogrammed messages released on a strategic schedule could have an impact on public opinion in sensitive moments for an authoritarian regime. The EFF’s eloquent Jillian York retorted “let’s not”. In short, […]
