Aaron Swartz: Looking Forward

With Aaron in NYC during last year's PIPA/SOPA protests. Photo: Gilly Younger/Flickr 

It's been five days since Aaron Swartz took his life in New York City, and a day since his funeral. The tragic news has both outraged and saddened the Internet community and beyond.

Aaron's story resonates with so many people. It has elements of classic lore: a young, often misunderstood genius, persecuted by corrupt authority, takes his life before his good work can be realized.

Perhaps even more tragically, it has taken Aaron's death for many to understand and protest the injustices he faced. It's right to critique a U.S. prosecutor's office that bullied Aaron to a point of desperation. But we should also focus attention on his good work, which was rooted in the belief that openness and access to knowledge are essential to social justice and a healthy democracy.

The Internet, Journalism and the Newtown Tragedy

There was some media head scratching in Hoboken Friday afternoon after a police source on the scene of the Newtown tragedy identified the shooter as 24-year-old Ryan Lanza. 

A Facebook search identified Lanza as a resident of Hoboken, which sent local and national news crews and helicopters scrambling to his 1313 Grand Street address. At the scene were Hoboken police and FBI who had roped off surrounding streets. 

I counted some 80 journalists and crew members across the police line before new information had the assailant as Ryan's younger brother Adam. But by that time the damage had been done with many mainstream outlets having to correct earlier reports.

The Masters of the Internet

Who controls the Internet?

That question rests uneasily at the center of debates this week at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai.

The 12-day wonkfest has brought together representatives from more than 150 U.N. member states to craft global rules for the Internet. And that's where the trouble begins.

For many at the conference, the working assumption is that governments should control the digital network. They've reached this conclusion without asking any of the billions of Internet users who might think otherwise. Nor have they sought the advice of the many civil society groups that are helping to building a grassroots Internet freedom movement with global reach.

A Week in the Life of a Media Mogul

What's Up With Rupert.
(Illustration by James Hindle)

While two former lieutenants in the U.K. are to be charged for bribery and corruption,

 … http://nyti.ms/T0VStP

Rupert Murdoch's fortunes are turning in the U.S.,

 … http://nyti.ms/QpTrp2

where Obama's top FCC official is planning to lift media ownership limits,

 … http://bit.ly/USQkr6

It's a News Corp.-friendly move that would pave the way for Murdoch to fulfill ambitions to buy the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune,

 … http://bit.ly/T8Z7Cu

Don't Believe the Spin. Dark Money Won.

(Illustration by Bill Brown)

Before Nov. 6 is written into history, we need to correct assumptions now circulating among Washington's pundit class.

First, the Obama victory didn't signal the demise of big-money politics. It didn't spell the end of the Super PAC, far from it. And the election wasn't a train wreck for political advertising -- even after groups paid billions for spots that supported losing candidates.

"The bad news is that money ran rampant in the 2012 campaigns, perhaps as much as $6 billion when it's all added up," Former Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps said during a recent event in Washington.

Voting in Hoboken

13th Street fire station

My Week with Sandy:

Two hours before peak tide

Hijacking Democracy

Photo: WiredBike

Former Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps spoke Thursday about whether the media are strengthening our democracy -- or destroying it.

His assessment -- after serving for more than a decade overseeing the industry -- is disturbing. Copps has long argued that the media in general, and TV broadcasters in particular, need to do a lot more to nourish civic discourse.

Unfortunately, the owners of the nation's television stations don't see it that way.

"The public airwaves," Copps said in a speech at the University of Delaware, "have been hijacked by those whose primary objective is to serve the special interests rather than the public interest."

We can see this in 2012 in the relentless barrage of toxic political ads. It's also apparent in the dearth of serious local news to correct the misinformation and expose the money behind the ads.

Denver Post Commentary: Stations Not Fact-Checking Enough

Originally published by the Denver Post

Re:"Denver newsrooms tops in fact-checking,"Oct. 13 Perspective story.

Kathleen Hall-Jamieson claims to have found a "flaw in the logic" of a recent Free Press report on fact-checking by Denver TV stations. That report found that, despite a few notable exceptions, Denver stations weren't doing enough to investigate false claims made in political ads.

Free Press looked at ad spending in August and September by five prominent third-party groups. During that time, Denver's four biggest stations aired 29 hours of ads from these groups and devoted less than 11 minutes to related coverage. That's a ratio of 162 minutes of ads for every minute of news.

Worse, stations kept airing ads their own reporters found were false or misleading. But Jamieson suggests that such statistics don't matter because voters can get fact-checking information from other sources, including her own site, FactCheck.org.

Your Lying TV

Illustration: Bill Brown

In 2012, politics are all about spreading lies and making money.

And we're not talking nickels and dimes. Campaigns and Super PACs are raising billions of dollars to win over voters. A large chunk of that money ends up in the pockets of local broadcasters who are selling off the airwaves to place political ads. And way too many of these ads are dishonest.

If you're a television viewer in a battleground market that means having to endure a relentless stream of misinformation. Best estimates are that more than half a million political ads will air nationwide by Election Day.

And what are broadcasters giving viewers in return? Next to nothing. They have done virtually no fact-checking of the claims made in political ads.

The Internet as Political Lie Detector

Illustration: Bill Brown

In a year of misleading political attack ads and distracted television newscasters, the Internet may offer salvation for voters seeking the truth.

A new Google poll found that 64 percent of battleground-state voters have used the Internet to fact-check the candidates in 2012.

They may have gone online after tuning out local television news, which has largely taken a pass on vetting the claims made in political ads they air. Two recent Free Press studies found that newscasters at stations in the most heavily saturated markets have failed to investigate the shadowy groups that place local political ads — or to question the content of the ads themselves.

A Free Press’ study of political ads in Milwaukee found that stations in May devoted 53 news segments to Justin Bieber while offering zero analysis of the groups behind political ads flooding local airwaves.

Scared Silly ...or... Why Photography Matters

Every so often I come across a body of photographs that is so perfect in its simplicity and execution.

A recent series of  images by Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls depict people at a particularly terrifying moment during a walk through a haunted house.

These images are remarkably photographic in that they show people as they are, in playful moments of shock at some unseen -- and fake -- threat.

Their flash of a reaction reveals much about these people as individuals, and about human nature. Of special note is our shared and immediate tendency to seek the physical comfort of others when startled unexpectedly.

And they're just funny. Some favorites:

In Pyongyang: The Ride of Your Life

Photo: NKNews.org

North Korea's newly refurbished amusement parks feature the "roller coaster of doom" (pictured right) known for its "previously malfunctioning harnesses," according to NKNews.org.

Mangyongdae and Taesongsan Funfair Parks recently re-opened to a limited crowd of Pyongyang's braver elite.

The parks, located on the outskirts of the city had fallen into disrepair during the rein of  Fearless Leader Kim Jong Il. Their cause was taken up by Jong Il's son and successor Kim Jong-un, who publicly reprimanded park management for poor maintenance during a visit in May.

Jong-un is not alone among Hermit Kingdom royalty in his love for theme parks. Half brother, Kim Jong-nam, had fallen from favor in 2001 after he was caught attempting to visit Tokyo Disneyland using a fake passport. Other reports claim that Jong Un himself had successfully duped Japanese authorities during an earlier visit to the theme park.

Political Hush Money

The Miami Herald's Edward Wasserman cites my reporting on political ad spending in a cutting  commentary on the state of local television news in 2012.

"The funders of political advertising appear to have purchased not just air time, but immunity from media scrutiny," writes Wasserman, who was recently named dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

"Some of the same media that should referee political discourse and oversee the process by which a sovereign electorate selects its leaders are in thrall to the backroom players whose mission it is to manipulate and game that discourse."

Wasserman refers to the findings in Left in the Dark and Money, News and Deception in Denver, two Free Press studies that ask whether the TV stations that are pocketing billions in political ad money are also reporting on the entities that bankroll those ads.

Big Bird Takes Back the Streets

Sales of Big Bird costumes are up this Halloween as many don yellow feathers to protest the GOP attack on public broadcasting. A sampling:

Photo: The Sacramento Bee

One Minute of News vs. 162 Minutes of Ads

Illustration: Bill Brown

Denver played host to the first presidential debate of 2012, but for TV viewers in the Rocky Mountain State, the political mudslinging has been going on for months, thanks in large part to the deluge of political ads from Super PACs and other third-party groups.

Since Aug. 1, these groups have joined with the official campaigns to buy time to air more than 26,000 political ads on the city's ABC, CBS, Fox and NBS affiliates.

The onslaught is wearing down many locals. "I have reduced drastically the amount of television I watch," Denver resident Larry Bahn said. "I have just about given up watching local news because the ads are almost continuous there."

Some Denver newscasts have tried to keep pace with the crush of political ads, examining their claims to separate fact from fiction.

Big Bird Storms the Debates

An occasional live blogging of the Big Bird meme of 2012:

7:24 a.m., Saturday -- I'm calling it at 7:24 a.m. EST, Saturday, Oct. 13. The Big Bird meme is officially dead.

8:00 a.m., Friday -- Public broadcasting executives don't enjoying being in the spotlight after Gov. Mitt Romney's pledged to cut funding to PBS. “We would very much like to be out of the picture as soon as possible,” Patrick Butler of the Association of Public Television Stations told the New York Times. “We think there are more important issues for presidential candidates to talk about than our little funding issue here.” 

8:00 a.m., Thursday -- Big Bird may have jumped the shark now that the Daily Show is mocking President Obama for overplaying Romney's debate-night comment. Host Jon Stewart lists a slate of Romney statements on other issues that should provide ammo to the Obama campaign, and slams them for picking a light-hearted Sesame Street ad as the focus of their post-debate spin. "You're going with the Big Bird buy, still!?" Stewart asks the president. The fear here is that very real concerns over the fate of public media are being eclipsed by Obama's mishandling of the issue. Perhaps the president should have clearly stated his full support for PBS funding and left it there. (See the Daily Show clip here).  

4:00 p.m. -- The Big Bird meme appears to be on the wane, one week since Gov. Mitt Romney announced his intention to cut federal funding to PBS, home to Sesame Street. The chart above is just one indicator. It tracks one week of Google News searches on "Big Bird" beginning Wednesday morning, hours after the conclusion of the presidential debates.

11:00 a.m. -- Sesame Street has released a statement urging the Obama campaign to take down a political ad that uses Big Bird to mock Gov. Mitt Romney. "We have approved no campaign ads," the organization said in a release. "As is our general practice, [we] have requested that both campaigns remove Sesame Street characters and trademarks from their campaign materials.

When it Comes to Political Ads, No News Is Good for Local TV Stations

The political ad invasion is upon us. It's a toxic mix of half truths and negativity that's beaming into homes across the country, but especially homes in battleground states like Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Media analysts project campaigns, Super PACs and often shadowy "social welfare" groups will spend a record-breaking $3.3 billion to buy up airtime as they attempt to influence voters before Nov. 6.

For the local stations that air these ads, it's a political goldmine. But what's a cash windfall for stations has become a nuisance for tens of millions of viewers who will have to endure thousands more political ads before Election Day (mercifully) arrives.

Happy Birthday #OWS

Some Occupy Wall Street portraits from the year that was. My focus in this work is to capture individuals within a crowd... to put a human face to large-scale democratic protests. This work is ongoing (click on images to enlarge):

The Current Runs Against Murdoch

Illustration: James Hindle

This week's Murdoch news raises as many questions as it answers, as the phone-hacking scandal enters its second year dominating front-page headlines worldwide.

But the controversy that has rocked Murdoch's British empire has caused little more than a ripple among America's political leadership.

On Monday, we learned that Rupert Murdoch had resigned from the boards of a number of News Corp. subsidiaries, including News International Group, Times Newspaper Holdings and News Corp. Investments.

These companies oversee British newspapers the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times. They also oversaw the News of the World before it was shuttered last summer as evidence of widespread phone hacking emerged.

Freedom = Censorship?

Photo: Timothy Karr

Think you have the right to speak freely via cellphones, websites and social media? Well, the companies that provide you with access to the Internet don’t.

The framers drafted the First Amendment as a check on government authority — not corporate power. But whether we’re texting friends, sharing photos on Facebook, or posting updates on Twitter, we’re connecting with each other and the Internet via privately controlled networks.

And the owners of these networks are now twisting the intent of the First Amendment to claim the right to control everyone's online information.

Taking the Internet Back to the Future

Welcome to the Comcast Age.

No, that's not a new corporate slogan, but the future facing Internet users everywhere.

Cable giants like Comcast and Time Warner have come to dominate information access in the United States. And they're using this new power to squeeze out competitors and remake new media in their old image.

For anyone online that means a future of fewer choices among broadband providers and less control over the digital diet that's fed across their networks.

Big Cable's Old Plan for New Media

Television is at a crossroads.There are two paths to choose from and two destinies for television viewers: one better, the other far worse. The path taken will have lasting political consequences.

One leads to a future where new technology offers millions of video channels streaming in and out of American homes via fast online networks.

The other involves a handful of local cable monopolies controlling what programming is aired — and blocking anything that might loosen their grip on viewers.

One future looks like the people-powered Internet, where choice is boundless and the audience is in charge. The other is a throwback to cable television's "gilded age," where powerful gatekeepers picked what people watched, when they watched it, and how much they paid for the privilege.

Reform in the Age of Corporate Lawyers

Illustration: Bill Brown

In the post-Citizens United era, wealthy individuals and corporations think democracy is a trophy they can buy, stuff and mount on their parlor walls.

But Americans scored a solid victory against big money in April when the Federal Communications Commission decided to require television broadcasters to post data online about political ad spending.

The FCC's ruling was encouraging for anyone hoping to shed light on the shadowy groups and campaign operatives that are funneling billions of dollars to local TV stations this year. The decision will help everyone get a clearer picture of the misinformation machine behind the flood of attack ads.

The Police, the iPhone and Your Right to Record

World Press Freedom Day came and went earlier this month. While it’s important to take a day to recognize our right to speak and share information, threats to our First Amendment freedoms happen all the time, everywhere.

It’s a threat that will become very real on the streets of Chicago this weekend, as a new breed of journalists and onlookers attempt to cover the protests surrounding the NATO summit.

Just ask Carlos Miller. The photojournalist has been arrested three times. His “crime?” Photographing the police. Most recently, in January, Miller was filming the eviction of Occupy Wall Street activists from a park in downtown Miami.

Super PACs Tell Lies, but the Media Spread Them

If you think presidential politics have gotten ugly, just wait.

With wealthy corporations and individuals spending billions of dollars to influence your vote, the real dirt is about to hit your TV screen like mud on a linen bed sheet.

According to the New York Times, which got its hands on a conservative proposal from a shadowy Super PAC, wealthy Republican strategists are working overtime on a billionaire-fueled campaign to flood the airwaves with race-laced attacks against President Obama:

The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.

Who's Afraid of Rupert Murdoch?

The answer: the Federal Communications Commission and Congress.

While the media mogul was called before Parliament and hammered by regulators in the United Kingdom, few in the halls of U.S. power are willing to call News Corp. to account for the “culture of corruption” that has spread through its media empire.

Late Wednesday, Sen. Frank Lautenberg asked FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski whether U.K. findings of News Corp.’s “rampant law breaking” meant the FCC would revoke any of the 27 broadcast licenses granted to Murdoch’s company in the U.S.

How Will the Murdoch Implosion Be Felt in the U.S.?

A scathing report in Britain that Rupert Murdoch and other News Corp. executives engaged in a cover-up of "rampant law breaking" may have ramifications for the media mogul in the United States.

How far-reaching those consequences are depends on U.S. politicians' willingness to face down one of the most powerful media figures of our generation.

But chinks in Murdoch's armor have deepened since last week, when a U.K. government investigation found that News Corp. executives hacked private phone messages, bribed government officials and then sought to conceal this wrongdoing, in part by giving misleading testimony to British law enforcement and Parliament.

Finding Frank in Hoboken

In 1955 Swiss photographer Robert Frank visited Hoboken to document the city's centennial celebration. It's a day that generated several memorable Frank photographs, including two that open his masterful photo essay "The Americans."

This one features as the cover of the book:

The Misinformation Machine

Published at BillMoyers.com

Dirty politics is a growth industry with few happy customers. In the run-up to Super Tuesday, television viewers nationwide had to endure an onslaught of negative and deceptive political ads.

For many in key primary and caucus states that meant sitting through up to 12 such ads an hour. And the vast majority of these ads went on the attack: The three political action committees buying the most television time this election season have spent more than 98 percent of their money on ads that discredit one or another candidate, according to Kantar Media.

These attacks by their very nature are misleading. FactCheck.org, which tracks accuracy in political messaging, found that the "avalanche of negativity" in recent political ads also contained a fair share of distortions and lies.

Murdoch's Date With Justice

A legal net is closing around media mogul Rupert Murdoch. On Monday a top investigator in London reported that senior News Corp. employees authorized hundreds of bribes to police officers and other government officials.

But these reports of criminal behavior in the United Kingdom have yet to trigger a prosecution of Murdoch here in the States, where top executives can be held liable for systematically bribing foreign officials.

To stop this scandal from jumping the Atlantic, Murdoch has added legions of lobbyists and lawyers to his ranks. Their goal is to defang the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it unlawful for a U.S. corporation to pay off a foreign official for the purpose of advancing or protecting a business interest.

The Intellectual Dishonesty at the Heart of the Heartland Institute

More media have pored over leaked internal memos that expose the intellectual dishonesty at the heart of the Heartland Institute, the coin-operated think tank that has made a living spreading lies in the service of corporations.

The most revealing of the memos reveals the Institute's plans to create an anti-climate change curriculum for k-12 schools nationwide. The goal, according to the memo is to show "that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain — two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science."

"There’s your smoking gun," write the editors at the Star-Ledger:

Minneapolis Star Tribune: The onslaught is coming to a TV near you

This piece was published earlier this week by the Star Tribune:

If Minnesotans flip on their TVs right now, they're likely to see at least one -- a political ad slinging mud at a presidential candidate.

As Tuesday's statewide caucuses approach, they're more likely to see many more. Viewers in Florida reported seeing as many as 12 political ads an hour in the runup to that state's Jan. 31 primary. The campaigns and super PACs that bought these ads have now turned their attention from Florida -- where they spent tens of millions of dollars on local media buys -- to Minnesota.

These attack ads by their very nature are negative. But they can also be misleading. FactCheck.org, which tracks accuracy in political messaging, found that the "avalanche of negativity" in recent Florida ads also contained a fair share of distortions and outright lies.

... Read the full oped.

Obama Joins the Democracy Sell Off

President Obama succumbed late Monday to the dark logic of the Super PACs, instructing top West Wing staffers to help raise money for the so-called "independent" groups that have been successful in picking winners and losers thus far in 2012.

"We decided to do this because we can't afford for the work you're doing in your communities, and the grassroots donations you give to support it, to be destroyed by hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads," Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina wrote supporters in an email Monday night.

This is no small news -- which explains why the New York Times placed this story on page one today -- as it signals that the president has reversed his earlier stance against working with Super PACs and joined others on the low road to political influence.

This Prettty Much Says it All

By Bill Brown, Free Press' ingenious graphic designer.

Citizens Inundated

Illustration: Bill Brown

The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision has already picked a winner in the 2012 elections: TV broadcasters.

Companies like CBS Corp, News Corp. and Sinclair Broadcast Group are already dividing the spoils of an election year that will see unprecedented spending on political ads.

More than $12 million was spent on ads during the Iowa Republican caucus. More than $14 million was spent on the South Carolina primary. And Floridians are already seeing the effect of millions more in ad buys as the state readies for next Tuesday's vote.

But that's just the first glimpse of an election year that will leave viewers awash in misinformation. All told TV broadcast companies stand to pocket more than $3 billion in political ad revenues by November. What they're not doing is letting viewers and voters in on the full story behind all this money and all these ads.

Why We Go Black

Speaking at a midtown PIPA/SOPA protest

Wikipedia and Google blacked out? Redditers in an uproar? Thousands of geeks abandoning their cubicles to take to the streets?

What's happening here?

Today's nationwide protest of Internet blacklist legislation is part of a brewing movement to keep control over the Internet out of the hands of corporations and governments. It's a struggle that puts Internet users before information gatekeepers. At stake is everyone's democratic right to information.

The movement owes its momentum to a recent sequence of events. Leading up to 2010 millions of Internet users became advocates in support of Net Neutrality protections. In 2011, the importance of digital freedom spilled out onto the streets as demonstrators with a mobile phones and a connection became a force in global protests.

Iowa Kicks Off the Media's Mud Season

If you flip on a local television station and watch for an hour or so, you're likely to see at least one: a political ad that attacks a local or national candidate.

If you live in any of the "battleground states," you'll see many, many more -- up to 12 political ads an hour.

Viewers in Iowa fell under a barrage of these ads leading up to Tuesday's caucuses. This on-air onslaught offers the rest of us a preview of what television viewing will be like as Election Day 2012 draws closer.

It's estimated that American television viewers will see such political ads aired more than 200,000 times by the first week in November. What we're far less likely to see is any explanation of who really sponsors these ads, what interests they represent and whether the content of the attacks is true.

Verizon's Broadband Bunk

A recent letter to the editor of the New York Times from Verizon Chairman Ivan Seidenberg had many scratching our heads today.

Seidenberg wrote to rebut a Times Op-Ed by former White House technology adviser Susan Crawford, in which she argues that the United States high-speed Internet marketplace suffers from a lack of competition, a problem that drives broadband prices up and services down for American Internet users.

"Over the last 10 years, we have deregulated high-speed Internet access in the hope that competition among providers would protect consumers," Crawford wrote. "The result? We now have neither a functioning competitive market for high-speed wired Internet access nor government oversight."

Mayor Bloomberg's First Amendment Problem

AFP reporter Jennifer Weiss films her own arrest

Since the beginning of his crackdown against the Occupy Wall Street movement, Mayor Mike Bloomberg has gone to great lengths to present himself as a champion of the First Amendment. But the free speech rhetoric coming from City Hall hasn't matched the brutal reality experienced by journalists at the front lines of the protest.

In the two months since the movement began 25 journalists have been arrested covering events across the country. More than half of these arrests have occurred in New York City, including 13 journalist arrests in the last week.

My colleague Josh Stearns, who maintains a running tally of media arrests and harassment, said that the NYPD's early morning raids on Zuccotti Park on November 15 resulted in the "single worst day for journalist attacks and arrests to date."

"From the beginning, I have said that the City had two principal goals," Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement following the raids, "guaranteeing public health and safety, and guaranteeing the protestors' First Amendment rights."

Saving the Democratic Internet

Opponents of the open Internet like to portray its guiding rule, Net Neutrality, as "a government takeover of the Internet."

They argue that from the day of its inception the Internet has existed free of regulation — a perfect expression of the marketplace at work.

What they don’t understand is that the Internet is a far better expression of democracy, and as such needs rules like Net Neutrality to ensure all users have equal access to online content.

And in reality the Internet as we now know it would never have existed were it not for rules and regulation, beginning with the openness standards created by the Internet’s founders some 40 years ago, codified in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and updated in recent orders by the Federal Communications Commission.

Why Is Justin Bieber So Hackin Mad?

Justin Bieber is pissed off and you should be, too.

What's made Bieber so angry? A bill in Congress that could rip apart the open fabric of the internet and let corporations censor free speech.

The "Stop Online Piracy Act" or SOPA gives private entities the power to blacklist websites at will. And it violates the due process rights of the thousands of users who could see their sites disappear from the Internet for doing something as innocent as posting a video of them singing along to their favorite song.

Learning from China?

These are the sort of heavy-handed Web control you'd expect to see in China, not in the United States.

What's Going On?

Photo: Timothy Karr

Three progressive minds attempt to capture the zeitgeist of the #OccupyWallStreet protests, which have moved with tremendous speed from the margins to the mainstream.

For evidence of this look no further than the protest coverage that made the front and editorial pages of today's New York Times. For the first two weeks of these protests the Times' editors for the most part had joined with other establishment media in a communal snub of the "Occupy" activism and its relevance.

There's a reason for the rapid, organic spread of the Wall Street actions, write Glenn Greenwald, Matt Stoller and Micah Sifry, three passionate thinkers on the evolution of movements in the age of open networks.

In his Wednesday commentary for Salon, Glenn Greenwald blasted the media and establishment Democrats for their smug dismissal of the protests, diagnosing their scorn as a form of self hatred that strikes those who "feign populist opposition to Wall Street for political gain."

High Noon for Internet Freedom

As democracy movements worldwide struggle to speak out via the Internet, many here in the U.S. may have overlooked an effort in Congress to undermine this basic freedom.

It takes the form of an arcane "resolution of disapproval" now wending its way through the Senate. If it passes, the resolution would void a recent Federal Communications Commission rule that seeks to preserve long-held Internet standards that protect users against blocking and censorship.

The resolution would remove these protections. It was put forth by industry-funded members of Congress who don't mind letting the few corporations who sell Internet access in America decide what we get to see, hear and read on the Internet.

These senators are also hoping the resolution will appease the most paranoid among the Tea Party faithful, who equate any consumer safeguard put in place during the Obama era with myriad and shadowy government plots.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who pushed a similar measure through the House earlier this year, stoked these fears when she said, "the FCC is in essence building an Internet Iron Curtain that will restrict more of our freedom."

Blackburn's rhetoric puts her and other supporters of the resolution far outside of the mainstream of Americans, who believe that neither the government nor corporations should be able to censor lawful content online.

If Congress succeeds in passing this measure, it will go well beyond deciding whether the FCC's recent rules are appropriate. The resolution will prohibit the agency from engaging in any effort to protect Internet freedom. The move opens the path for corporations eager to take a wrecking ball to the open architecture that has made the Internet a great equalizer for all users.

Lobbyists and lawyers working for the likes of AT&T, Comcast and Verizon have argued that these companies need to take control of your clicks to more efficiently — and profitably — manage the abundance of user-driven innovations online. They promise to be good stewards of this unruly medium if only regulators will take away the one network protection that ensures everyone's right to connect with everyone else on the Internet.

That's not what the Internet's founders intended. They built the network to be free of gatekeepers, giving each user equal access to all the legal content and applications online.

These engineers couldn't have envisioned that this open design would, in a relatively short time, evolve to make the network a potent political tool for freedom movements and democratic organizing worldwide.

But it has. Think of the explosion of Internet organizing and political expression that has swept the world in 2011, from Tunisia to Tehran to Beijing, and is now being embraced in America by protesters determined to Occupy Wall Street.

Americans cherish freedom of speech as much as people across North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. An open Internet allows all sides of contentious issues to be heard by anyone who chooses to listen. It opens up a global pipeline for protest movements, a window for millions to witness injustices and a platform on which to organize for a better future.

So ask yourself this: Do you want Congress to surrender your right to choose online to a company whose sole motive is to generate as much profit as possible? Do you want to wipe away the only protection that prevents any entity — be it corporate or government — from blocking our right to connect with one another?

The hardliners in Congress who support this resolution have joined in a pact with powerful Internet providers and free-market extremists to kill off your most fundamental online right.

It's now up to us users to use the open Internet to reclaim it.

Welcome to Your Hungarian Internet

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that the U.S. has sunk to 25th in a global ranking of Internet speeds, just behind Romania.

Why? Because our nation's regulators abandoned an earlier commitment to foster competition in the marketplace for Internet access providers.

In the years that followed the signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, lobbyists working for powerful providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon pressured a compliant FCC to tear down all of the important safeguards established by Congress.

Under the Bush administration, the FCC tossed out competitive broadband safeguards such as open-access requirements, which opened lines to other providers. In 2002 the agency declared that high-speed cable Internet access would no longer be considered a telecommunications service that opened the network to competitors, but rather an “information service” that did not. Following a 2005 court decision, the FCC also reclassified broadband delivered by the phone companies as an “information service.”

These were radical policy shifts that went against the long-held assumption that open communications in competitive markets were essential to economic growth and innovation.

While the U.S. blindly followed a path of "deregulation," other nations in Europe and Asia beefed up their pro-competitive policies. The results are evident in our free fall from the top of almost every global measure of Internet services, availability and speed.

About this my Free Press colleague Derek Turner writes:

"By turning its back on the 1996 Act, the FCC ordered up a future of digital mediocrity and stuck American consumers with the bill. Americans pay more per month for broadband than consumers in all but seven of the 30 nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development ... When price and speed are considered together as a measure of value, we see that Americans pay more per megabit per second than consumers in many other countries. The value of U.S. connections is some four times less than that of countries like France, and is only slightly better than the value of connections in Hungary, a country with a per capita GDP nearly two-and-a-half times lower than the United States."

The lack of competition has turned America into a broadband backwater. In the aftermath of the FCC’s decisions, powerful phone and cable companies legislated and lobbied their way to controlling 97 percent of the fixed-line residential broadband market — leaving the vast majority of consumers with two or fewer choices of land-based providers in any given market.

The absence of true consumer choice has driven prices up and services down. Wednesday's New York Times reports that in some parts of the country the situation has had a direct impact on economic growth, education and public safety.

"This is about our overall competitiveness," Jonathan Adelstein of the Rural Utilities Service told the Times. "Without broadband, especially in rural areas, kids might not reach their full potential. And we can’t expect to be competitive in a global economy."

Vast Wasteland Revisited

On Monday, the top thinkers in new and old media gathered at Harvard to discuss the state of the media, 50 years after FCC Chairman Newton Minow slammed the nation’s broadcasters for creating a “Vast Wasteland” across the television dial.

Though I did not attend the event, MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman did an excellent job of reporting out via Twitter and his blog.

What’s remarkable in Ethan’s summary is the sense that, while the technology and players have shifted, the problem of U.S. media remains the same: A failure to foster the sort of public interest, independent and noncommercial media system to serve as an antidote to the dreck of commercial news and information that infects America's political discourse.

I could go on about that, and will at a later date. For now I want to put a placeholder in the important comments that were made in Cambridge (Again, as reported by Ethan).

Fifty years on and Minow still seems to have kept a Gimlet eye on the state of our media. He told participants at yesterday's event: "Politicians need massive amounts of money to buy radio and television ads. They raise money from the public to gain access to something the public owns: the airwaves."

This is because the U.S. is one of a few developed democracies that has not offered candidates free access to our airwaves. Why? Because the powerful broadcast lobby makes too much money selling ad space to them -- a number estimated to soar near $3 billion in the 2012 cycle -- and have blocked every political attempt to introduce free time.

Meanwhile their reporting on political candidates and campaigns has devolved into horse race coverage and gotcha moments, devoid of discussions of the issues that Americans say matter most in an election.

Dysfunctional

Bloomberg’s Jonathan Alter noted that today's news business is "largely dysfunctional." Much of the political news we get isn't news at all, he says, but "people like me babbling on MSNBC or Fox," rather than the sort of expensive newsgathering required to report facts on the ground.

These are common complaints made by media reformers such as myself, my colleagues at Free Press, and across the larger movement.

What's less common is the direction the discussion then takes, towards the shifting political power dynamic of social and mobile media.

Yochai Benkler, one of the world's leading thinkers on new networks, helps make the transition:

"Because we all now carry sound, video and text generating and disseminating tools – phones – we’ve got an unprecedented opportunity to close the gap between what costs a great deal of money and what we all need as citizens."

Benkler alludes to something that we've been saying at Free Press for some time now: "Your phone is political." We recognize that our right to connect via mobile devices is vital to the future health of our or any other democracy.

Broken Promises

Mass media once promised to engage millions in democracy, making information available to people who were previously excluded from the political process. But the age of television seems to have done the opposite.

A survey of voter turnout in the age of television elections (1960 through 2008) shows a national average of 55 percent. In the presidential elections that occurred from 1860 through 1956, voter turnout reached an average 67 percent.

"The political conversation involves a maximum of 10 to 15 million people," Alter says, "but 130 million vote in Presidential elections."

Moreover, a survey published late last year by CTIA counts more than 300 million mobile accounts in the U.S. -- or some 95 percent of the population.

What Mobile Movement?

The link transforming mobile phone users to political speakers and participants remains tenuous, but the potential for inserting new voices in the political process is immense, as is the importance of protecting their freedom to connect.

Susan Crawford says that control over this freedom now rests in the hands of new players, not the broadcasters of old but the distributors of new. She includes massively and vertically integrated companies like Comcast among a rogues gallery of the few cable and telecommunications colossi that control both our wired and wireless worlds.

Ethan adds that "In this new world, the FCC may not be the prime mover -- the real power is located in intermediaries like Google, and if we were to push for the public interest, that’s where we’d apply leverage."

Indeed, if only we had a broader movement to do just that.

BART and the New Era of Censorship

I have spent most of the week poring over news stories, blogs and commentary on last week’s decision by Bay Area Rapid Transit officials to shut off cellphone service to quash planned protests on its trains and platforms.

Opinions are many and range from BART spokesman Linton Johnson, who says constitutional rights end the moment people walk through transit-authority turnstiles, to “X” of the hacker collective Anonymous, who protested BART’s action and said our freedom to connect should be absolute and universal.

I tend to agree with “X,” but adding my criticism to what has already been heaped on BART seems of little consequence at this point.

What does matter is the dangerous precedent set by public agencies that silence new media, and the need for clarity about our free speech rights regardless of the medium.

The San Francisco incident is not unique. Earlier this summer Cleveland’s City Council passed an ordinance outlawing the use of Facebook and other social media to assemble unruly crowds. While a mayoral veto struck down the Cleveland ruling, the overreaction is part of a spreading official backlash against political organizing on new media.

Other governments have responded the same — see China, Burma, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and beyond. In many instances they simply direct the state-run service provider and cellphone carriers to shut down their networks.

In the U.S., though, companies often flip the kill switch on their own. Verizon Wireless blocked text messages in 2007 that a reproductive rights group sought to send to its members. The carrier decided that the texts were “controversial and unsavory” and implemented a rule buried deep within the company’s terms of service that gives Verizon the power to cut off mobile communications “without prior notice and for any reason or no reason.”

That Verizon reversed its decision after its censorship was exposed by the New York Times should offer little comfort — neither should the notion that fierce public criticism has sufficiently warned BART against switching off mobile communications in the future.

These incidents reveal a growing pattern of abuse and a great measure of confusion over free speech rights in the tangled realm of new media.

“We have free speech rights everywhere. Or at least everywhere in the U.S. when government applies its power,” argues First Amendment scholar Marvin Ammori.

“If the spokesperson for BART reflects BART’s understanding about freedom of speech at stations, then BART’s leadership is wrong,” Ammori says, adding that dismissing the free speech rights of citizens in such a reckless and all-encompassing fashion puts BART on shaky legal ground.

While these are new technologies, this isn’t a new issue. People have sought to speak out using the best means available, whether that’s strapping a note to a pigeon’s leg, handing out printed pamphlets on a street corner or tweeting from the subway.

Governments have routinely sought to shut down technologies that disrupt their authority. But our basic freedoms should remain intact. Whether public and private entities have the right to silence social media and cellphone networks has become a question for the courts.

That’s why the recent uptick in U.S. censorship is cause for real concern — and reason enough for our judicial system to provide clarity on behalf of free speech everywhere.

Murdoch Façade Crumbling as Scandal Takes Root in America

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) is reportedly preparing to deliver subpoenas to News Corporation employees and others as part of its expanding investigation into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

A separate FBI investigation is underway in response to reports that the company may have hacked into the phone messages of victims of the September 11 attacks. (Free Press is part of a larger coalition of groups urging Washington to call News Corp. executives including Rupert Murdoch to testify before Congress )

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act holds U.S. companies legally accountable for crimes committed abroad, especially bribes that are paid to foreign officials to protect and expand the company’s business interests.

News Corp. is running its own campaign to downplay these allegations, distance father and son from the alleged crimes, and contain the scandal to the U.K. The Wall Street Journal and Fox News Channel are leading the charge with carefully contrived editorials and on-air stagecraft. One person with ties to News Corp. told The Journal that the DoJ subpoenas are “a fishing expedition with no evidence to support it.”

Not according to British investigators, who received a trove of documents and emails from News International that identify at least $160,000 in bribes paid to police officers. This handover of evidence has been confirmed by more credible news outlets, including the New York Times and the Guardian, that have covered the unfolding investigations.

Robert Lenzner of Forbes writes that News Corp efforts to cover-up the scandal are now “cracking” as two former executives come forth to claim that James Murdoch wasn't telling the whole truth during his testimony before Parliament on Tuesday. One former executive, Tom Crone, should know. He served as part of the legal team that advised Murdoch, Jr. during an earlier investigation that involved phone hacking.

“When the full extent of the hacking and the amounts paid to police are known, the Murdochs’ claim [that] they knew nothing of these activities – and were betrayed – will go up in smoke,” Lenzner writes.

And as more leads indicate that crimes were indeed committed on U.S. soil -- including actor Jude Law's claim that his phone was hacked as he was passing through New York City’s JFK Airport -- the likelihood increases that this scandal will create heat for the Murdochs on this side of the Atlantic.

More fish for the frying pan.

Washington Slowly Wakes Up from AT&T's Fantasy

Congress may be finally waking up to the obvious: that the massive merger of AT&T with T-Mobile just doesn't make sense.

No amount of contributions from AT&T, or visits from AT&T lobbyists, will alter this simple truth.

On Wednesday, the Senate's top antitrust official, Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, weighed the facts and wrote a letter urging Attorney General Eric Holder and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to reject AT&T's proposed takeover.

Sen. Kohl wrote that "the acquisition, if permitted to proceed, would likely cause substantial harm to competition and consumers, would be contrary to antitrust law and not in the public interest, and therefore should be blocked by your agencies."

Sen. Kohl's joined a growing chorus of opposition in Washington to the proposed merger. Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) also submitted a letter on Wednesday stating that they believed AT&T's takeover of T-Mobile "would be a troubling backward step in federal public policy -- a retrenchment from nearly two decades of promoting competition and open markets to acceptance of a duopoly in the wireless marketplace."

Opposition to this unprecedented consolidation is growing, and will only continue to grow once policymakers and the public see that the facts contradict AT&T's propaganda.

In his letter, Sen. Kohl provides a detailed analysis of the deal, and notes that T-Mobile is one of the sectors strongest price competitors, with services costing from $15 to $50 less than comparable plans on AT&T. T-Mobile is a "competitor that disciplines price increases from all three other national cell phone competitors," Sen. Kohl writes, adding that approval of the merger "raises a substantial likelihood that prices will rise."

He also notes that the merger would hand AT&T and Verizon control of 80 percent of the market, Kohl cites antitrust law, which explicitly forbids mergers that "may tend to substantially lessen competition."

Despite a mountain of evidence to support Sen. Kohl's claim, AT&T continues to say, as it did in its filing to the FCC, that "the wireless marketplace will be more competitive" as a result of this merger.

It gets worse. In response to Sen. Kohl's letter, AT&T spokesman Michael Balmoris said that the senator's view "is inconsistent with antitrust law, is shared by few others and ignores the many positive benefits and numerous supporters of the transaction."

Think about that for a second. A top AT&T flack is saying that a highly respected leader of the Judiciary Committee, who is considered an expert in matters related to antitrust, knows nothing about antitrust law, or knows less than AT&T's public relations department.

While their false claims about competition seem obvious to everyone, especially those who can count, convincing Washington to question the gospel of AT&T is no easy task.

The phone giant has spent $200 million on lobbyists and campaign contributions over the years. This astronomical sum goes a long way toward explaining why earlier this month a sum a cabal of House Democrats looked the other way and signed a letter stating that the merger would lead to billions of dollars in new investment and create thousands of new jobs.

Never mind that the opposite is true, that the merger will mark a net drop in capital expenditures for network build out and likely result in layoffs for more than 20,000 "redundant" T-Mobile employees.

In Washington, the facts too often don't hold a candle to a phalanx of industry lobbyists and a pile of campaign checks. Until now, this toxic blend of misinformation and cash has hijacked the debate surrounding this merger, and just about every other effort to reform the forces of the status quo.

The good news is that the common-sense efforts of Kohl and others are staring to unravel AT&T's fantasy. More people inside Washington have begun to see its lobbying juggernaut for what it is: a well-funded push for a government handout, instead of competing fairly in the free market.

AT&T doesn't need to acquire T-Mobile to serve rural America or improve the quality of its service. And as more members of Congress point out, this merger will kill competition and lead to higher prices, reduced investment and more unemployment.

As Washington separates fact from fantasy, the regulators at the DOJ and FCC simply need to do their jobs. They will surely have no choice but to reject this takeover outright.

Imagining what those T-Mobile ads would look like

Murdoch Scandal Jumps the Pond

The media scandal that's snared Rupert Murdoch and other News Corporation executives in Great Britain has crossed the Atlantic, and could cause more homegrown trouble for the U.S.-based media company.

In the past 48 hours, Democratic Sens. Jay Rockefeller, Frank Lautenberg, Barbara Boxer and Robert Menendez have called for an investigation of News Corp., saying that the behavior of Murdoch's executives and staff in England raises serious questions about the legality of the conduct of the company under U.S. law.

And the calls haven't been exclusively partisan. On Wednesday, Republican Rep. Peter King said the allegations of News Corp phone hacking were "disgraceful" and warranted an FBI investigation.

Already a range of groups including Free Press, Public Campaign, ThinkProgress, CREDO Action and Media Matters for America has collected signatures from 100,000 Americans demanding an investigation. ColorofChange.org is organizing a sizable protest to occur outside Murdoch's Manhattan townhouse on Thursday.

New Allegations to Come

It's clear from reports in the media that more allegations are going to surface, and that they'll not be limited to crimes committed in the United Kingdom.

Reporters at the Murdoch-owned news properties allegedly hacked the phone messages of more than 4,000 people, including the voicemail of a 13-year-old murder victim Milly Dowler, which set off a furious public backlash in Britain. But News of the World journalists were based in the United States during the time the paper allegedly hacked into people's phone records.

We already know that some reportedly tried to pay a New York City police officer to hack into the phone messages of the American families and victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

We also know that News Corp., as an American company, is accountable to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which states that U.S. companies can be prosecuted for crimes committed abroad. (Part of the investigation unfolding in the UK involves $160,000 in bribes allegedly paid to police by Murdoch executives to stifle an investigation of the phone hacking).

On Tuesday, former New York State Governor and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer wrote that the Justice Department has been very actively prosecuting FCPA violations in recent years. "The News Corp. case presents a pretty simple test for Attorney General Eric Holder," Spitzer wrote. "If the department fails to open an immediate investigation into News Corp.'s violations of the FCPA, there will have been a major breach of enforcement at Justice."

Murdoch Not Above the Law

Murdoch has amassed a worldwide media empire, which in America includes Fox News Channel, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, and hundreds of local broadcast stations and cable channels.

For too long, Murdoch has leveraged his enormous media power to get what he wants from leaders in Washington and London, and to insulate himself and his company from official scrutiny.

This is exactly the problem that media reformers have been warning about for years. When one company amasses too much control over a nation's public discourse, democracy suffers.

It seems clear now that Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp. colleagues believed that their tremendous media power placed them above the law.

But fortunes are turning, and Rupert Murdoch must now answer for all that has happened under his watch. If he or his executives broke the law, they need to be held accountable in the United States.

The Trouble with Rupert

There are many reasons that the scandal that's engulfing Rupert Murdoch has riveted public attention over the last seven days. It's a story that features all of the classic elements: twists of fate, betrayal, deception, abuse of power, and, even, murder.

But beneath Murdoch's meltdown lies a bigger problem, and its one that's not confined to the United Kingdom. It plagues all consolidated news organizations that reach a certain size and stature, but especially News Corp: The problem of media that get too cozy with power.

There's a disturbing parallel between Rupert Murdoch's methods in the UK and those he deploys in the US. More than any of the current crop of media moguls, Murdoch accrues political influence through aggressive manipulation of News Corp's many media outlets. It's not just in the ways they cover the news but how they use this coverage to gain favorable access to elected officials.

Consider the easy rapport struck among Murdoch's London executives and conservative candidate David Cameron. After he was elected Prime Minister, Cameron tapped a top News International executive to be his spokesman.

Compare that to the way Fox News Channel has courted GOP presidential candidates, many of whom have served as paid commentators for the network, in expectation that one may succeed in his or her bid for the White House.

In Sunday's New York Times, David Carr wrote: "News Corporation has historically used its four [London] newspapers... to shape and quash public debate, routinely helping to elect prime ministers with timely endorsements while punishing enemies at every turn."

Look at how control of media outlets in another powerful city -- New York, where he owns the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, two television stations, and where both News Corp and Fox News Channel are headquartered -- has placed Murdoch on the A-list among Manhattan's glitterati.

Comforting the Comfortable

Murdoch's relentless pursuit of political power has turned Finley Peter Dunne's famous quote about the role of journalism on its head. News Corp sees its purpose as "comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted."

It was a fortunate twist of fate -- thanks in large part to the dogged reporting of The Guardian -- that the afflicted would eventually have their say.

Reports revealed that News of the World staffers had hacked into the phone messages of a kidnapped and murdered 13-year-old to get a scoop. They even deleted messages in order to listen to more of the parents' desperate pleas, and, in the process, misled investigators to believe that the victim was still alive.

Now, the Daily Mirror reports that Murdoch's journalists at the News of the World had offered to pay New York police officer to hack into the phone messages of victims of the September 11 attacks here in the States.

Until now Murdoch's comfy ties to leadership have proven fruitful in promoting candidates, and winning official approval of the policies and mergers he has sought over the years.

But this could be changing. As A.C. Grayling wrote in a Friday Times op-ed, "News International's bid to take control of the television company British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, was, in the opinion of many, a step too far, given that, even before the hacking revelations, its influence on politics and public conversation had become deeply corrosive."

This corrosive influence over London's political class is no less true of News Corp here in the US, where Murdoch displays a ruthless drive for access and control. That's why it was reassuring when a federal appeals court last week rejected a 2007 ruling by the Federal Communications Commission that would have let media giants amass more power by buying up more local news outlets.

The move no doubt delivered a blow to Murdoch's ambitions. And if past is prologue his reaction will be harsh.

In the 1990s, when the FCC was threatening to take away a single News Corp broadcast license, Murdoch's chief in-house lobbyist, Preston Padden, warned then FCC Chairman Reed Hundt's chief of staff that he would not be able to "get a job as dog-catcher" if the agency proceeded with its plans.

Murdoch later assailed Hundt in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, which triggered widespread attacks against the FCC chair by Congressional Republicans.

But the tables may now have turned against the media mogul. Had the FCC been allowed to loosen its curbs to consolidation this time around, Murdoch could have moved to control many more broadcast and print news outlets in New York, and elsewhere.

Last week's appeals court ruling was not only a rebuke of the FCC's decision, but also of the idea that the amassing of more media power posed no threat to our democracy.

America's founding fathers understood that media are essential to an informed electorate. What they may not have foreseen was rise of a media mogul like Rupert Murdoch, for whom the media serve merely as a means to his political ends.

The misdeeds of Murdoch's empire -- both here and abroad -- serve as plain evidence that last week's appeals court decision to curb consolidation was the right move.

The Difference Between 'Town Halls' and Town Halls

Twitter's #AskObama question selection process was "like panning for gold in the wrong stream," tweeted Economist political writer Will Wilkinson.

Wilkinson should know. He was one of the "curators" asked to sift through the feed and select questions for President Obama during Wednesday's live event.

According to CNN, the so-called "Twitter Town Hall" was so heavily moderated and filtered that only 0.045% of the 40,000 questions asked were actually posed to the president.

While it's not realistic to expect the president to answer all 40,000 questions, we can hope for a process whereby questions are selected in a more democratic or even random way.

In real town hall meetings, any person who gets to the microphone gets to ask a question of officials. If you've witnessed a local city council meeting, you know that this often makes for odd, populist political theater (with a fair dose of paranoid ranting thrown into the mix).

And yet unfiltered questions often throw officials off script and make for revealing moments that feel much more like the truth. The end result is far more participatory and democratic than any of the recent "Town Halls" run by Facebook and Twitter.

Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder who delivered the questions to Obama, is open to changing up the play on future Twitter Town Halls. After the event he tweeted that the event was a "great first step for future Town Halls," and he asked his nearly 1.7 million followers for advice: "How can we make Twitter @TownHalls better in the future?"

Any ideas?

Google+ vs. Facebook: Should Human Rights Factor in Your Choice of Social Network?

Question: What would billionaire Mark Zuckerberg lose by refusing Chinese demands that he censor Facebook? What would he and his company gain from being more principled?

This came up after reading Christopher Luna's analysis of Google+ as an alternative to Facebook, Zuckerberg's social networking colossus that boasts 750 million users globally.

Google+, which launched in beta last week, has been Topic One among the “digerati,” who've spent much of the week kicking the tires of Facebook's new competitor and reporting back to followers and friends.

But Luna, a masters student at Harvard Divinity School, looked at the competing services through a different lens.

He wrote that he’s come to trust Google more because of its refusal to buckle to Chinese censors:

Google is currently in a power war with China, and Google has made the correct choice in its difficult decision between compromising with a totalitarian government that would exert every pressure possible, legal and illegal, to use the information that we trust to Google to continue its campaign against freedom and dissidence.

Facebook, Cisco and Microsoft have shown themselves to be much more willing to comply with Chinese gatekeepers in order to gain access to the nation’s vast marketplace of users.

For Luna, Google's stance on behalf of free speech and human rights should be the deciding factor for social media users.

"The choice here isn't just about business. It's about whether a capitalist economy can show that the bottom line is not the only thing in the world that matters," he writes. "It's about whether a corporation can exist and thrive while standing by principles that support the value of human beings."

In 2011, networked technology has become a megaphone for freedom movements from Tunisia and Yemen to Burma and Vietnam. Yet at the same time new media companies have provided repressive regimes with the means to turn technology against their citizenry -- to spy on communications, censor content and, even, track down dissidents for arrest.

And while I agree with Luna that Google has a better record than Facebook on several open Internet and human rights issues, both are in the business of selling us, their users, to advertisers. For some people, that basic fact -- including their need to gather as much data as possible about us whether we are aware of it or not -- compromises their products too much. (Wouldn't it be great if those 750 million people used Diaspora's open social network instead?)

In a more perfect world tech companies that stand up for freedom and justice should naturally be more successful economically. This isn't the way our globalized markets have functioned over the centuries, but perhaps we've reached a point in our newly connected world where principles can lead to profits.

For this to succeed, though, consumers will need to become more engaged in corporate behavior both at home and abroad, and to vote with their wallets (and clicks) for the company that takes the high road.

For Luna, the choice is obvious: "I'd like to see Google win this war [with Facebook], and I know who's side I'm on here. I kind of think that leaving Facebook is one way that we can participate…"