So while Flickr should be used for displaying pictures of cute cats, it’s also proved an effective tool for avoiding keyword filtering. Activists in China are using Flickr to disseminate images that contain words that get blocked by keyword filters - a simple tool built by Zhang Erning allows a photo of Einstein at a blackboard to be annotated with arbitrary text that won’t be blocked by the Chinese firewall. You can post videos of the Star Wars kid on YouTube… but you can also post videos of Zimbabwean labor activists being beated by government thugs. Twitter lets Robert Scoble tell me what he’s doing 200 freaking times a day… but it also lets me know whether Egyptian activists have been released from the police station when they go in for questioning.
It’s important that these tools are generally used for banal purposes. If internet entrepreneurs created “Protestr” as a web 2.0 tool for activists, no repressive goverment would leave it unblocked. But blocking a tool that is mostly used for amusement or communication between friends has consequences – the users looking for cute cat videos get annoyed that YouTube is blocked… and learn about their government’s willingness to constrain speech. This cost doesn’t mean that governments won’t choose to block these tools, but it makes the calculus more complicated.
