Tuesday, January 18, 2011 – Human Rights on the Web: dinner discussion with Ethan Zuckerman
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Can the internet be used to promote human rights and to take down oppressive regimes around the world? Or do new technologies actually empower the authoritarian states that activists seek to challenge? Journalistic accounts of the recent turmoil in Iran suggest that new media played a key role in organizing and inspiring activists, but other evidence shows that the regime used the same tools to to harass, identify, and imprison protesters. Finally, what implications do these questions and stories have for the development of new web technologies for social change?
Join Amnesty International and Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of the global citizen media network, Global Voices, and senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, for a theoretical and empirical discussion on the interface between the web and human rights. A recent paper, co-authored by Zuckerman, on the topic can be found here (http://www.usip.org/publications/blogs-and-bullets-new-media-in-contentious-politics).
