The Great Debate UK

from Paul Smalera:

What real Internet censorship looks like

Lately Internet users in the U.S. have been worried about censorship, copyright legalities and data privacy. Between Twitter’s new censorship policy, the global protests over SOPA/PIPA and ACTA and the outrage over Apple’s iOS allowing apps like Path to access the address book without prior approval, these fears have certainly seemed warranted. But we should also remember that Internet users around the world face far more insidious limitations and intrusions on their Internet usage -- practices, in fact, that would horrify the average American.

Sadly, most of the rest of the world has come to accept censorship as a necessary evil. Although I recently argued that Twitter’s censorship policy at least had the benefit of transparency, it’s still an unfortunate cost of doing global business for a company born and bred with the freedoms of the United States, and founded by tech pioneers whose opportunities and creativity stem directly from our Constitution. Yet by the standards of dictatorial regimes, Internet users in countries like China, Syria and Iran should consider themselves lucky if Twitter’s relatively modest censorship program actually keeps those countries’ governments from shutting down the service. As we are seeing around the world, chances are, unfortunately, it won’t.

Consider the freedoms -- or lack thereof -- Internet users have in Iran. Since this past week, some 30 million Iranian users have been without Internet service thanks to that country’s blocking of the SSL protocol, right at the time of its parliamentary elections. SSL is what turns “http” -- the basic way we access the Web -- into “https”, which Gmail, your bank, your credit card company and thousands of other services use to secure data. SSL provides data encryption so that only each end point -- your browser and the Web server you’re logging into -- can decrypt and access the data contained therein.

By blocking SSL, Iran has crippled Tor, a program that enables Internet users to anonymize not just their content but their physical location as well. Tor is a very common workaround for users in totalitarian regimes to access Twitter, Gmail, Facebook and other services. It’s hard to come up with an apt analogy for Iran’s unprecedented blockage -- it’s not just that the letters you send are read by the Post Office and photocopied for their records, it’s that the Post Roads themselves have been closed off, so you can’t even send a letter in the first place. That’s the net effect of blocking SSL in Iran.

The hacking group Anonymous has brought down all kinds of websites in protest, mostly over copyright, in the U.S. and Europe. I don’t advocate their targeting any country’s servers for retribution, but where is the outrage or public demonstration or media attention over the denials of Iranians’ basic freedoms to communicate, via the Internet?

Unfortunately, it’s still too easy for Internet companies and even the Internet’s founding fathers to dismiss the importance of the tools they created in fostering free and open public dialogue, especially in places like Iran. Recently, legendary engineer and Google Vice-President Vint Cerf published a New York Times op-ed entitled “Internet Access is Not a Human Right,” where he wrote: “Internet access is always just a tool for obtaining something else more important.” How wrong he is. Cerf’s line of thinking eviscerates the Internet -- the wonder of the modern world he helped build. Cerf argues that humans have the right to “lead healthy, meaningful lives,” including having “freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.” Yet, we live in the 21st century: It’s hard to see how, among people whose economies are developed enough to afford them communication devices, Cerf would excuse governments that curtail their citizens’ freedom and right to use the ultimate communications tool -- the global network of the Internet. In fact, in underdeveloped parts of the world, the cost to have a cell phone that connects to the Web can be quite affordable.

I’m not arguing semantics here -- if our society excludes the Internet from the fundamental rights of human communication, we also excuse totalitarian regimes like Iran’s from any repercussions when it comes to blocking that avenue of human contact. It’s a dangerous compromise to make in a world that only gets more digital with each passing day. And it also conveniently excuses the free world from having to do much of anything about it. We wouldn’t forgive Iran if it threw 30 million citizens into solitary confinement -- so why would we ignore it when the Iranian government effectively cuts the entire population off from the outside world, to stifle their voices during a critical electoral cycle?

from MediaFile:

Apple and Twitter: A New Power Duo?

One big winner coming out of Apple’s developers’ conference on Monday is Twitter.

Apple announced that the Internet microblogging service will be integrated directly into future versions of the iPhone and iPad software.

That means iPhone users can quickly publish information on Twitter by tapping on a photo taken with the iPhone’s camera, or by tapping on a news article in the phone’s Web browser.

It’s the kind of front-and-center placement that any of Apple’s thousands of app-makers would kill for, and it will likely provide a nice boost to Twitter’s traffic of 140-character Tweets.

It may also represent the latest alliance in the ongoing battle of the technology titans.

The collaboration between Apple and Twitter could signal a new power duo, playing in smartphones and social networking – the two powerful forces that are re-shaping today’s computing, advertising and media markets.

How deep the Apple/Twitter partnership may be is still unclear. Twitter referred questions to Apple about whether the integration involved any financial terms, and Apple did not return a request for comment.

from Felix Salmon:

Understanding Twitter’s valuation

Count me in with Paul Kedrosky: there's something extremely irritating about Shira Ovide's Deal Journal blog post this morning kvetching about how high the mooted valuation of Twitter is.

The valuation -- somewhere between $8 billion and $10 billion -- is explicitly not based on Twitter's current revenues. Yet Ovide insists on calculating silly ratios designed to make the valuation look as outlandish as possible:

Twitter’s revenue last year was $45 million, our Journal colleagues reported. So a $10 billion valuation would be more than 200 times the company’s revenue, or nearly 100 times its estimated 2011 revenue of $100 million to $110 million. Help me out here, folks: has any real business ever been slapped with such a high multiple?

Or, let’s pick another valuation metric. At $10 billion, Twitter is valued at $105 for each of the 95 million tweets its users write every day. (I’ll wait for my share of the check for those Twitter messages.)

I'm sorry, Shira, but "capitalization per tweet per day" is not a "valuation metric." And in any case, your share of the check is likely to be pretty small: you're averaging 0.4 tweets per day yourself, so far this month.

And valuing Twitter based on its revenues is exactly what Twitter's suitors aren't doing:

"Are these prices justifiable based on financial multiples? No," said Ethan Kurzweil of venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners. But these start-ups are building social services and have lots of data about their users and "the market is valuing that mightily right now."

In fact, the value of Twitter's user data is just a part of what's making it attractive right now. The interesting question about Twitter's valuation is not how high it is, but rather the way in which it can be justified. People are putting real cash money into Twitter at massive valuations -- the company just raised $200 million at a $3.7 billion valuation, and Andreessen Horowitz just bought $80 million of stock in the secondary market at levels which might well be higher than that. These investors aren't stupid, so what's their reasoning?

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistan, blasphemy, and a tale of two women

For all the bad news coming out of Pakistan, you can't help but admire the courage of two very different women who did what their political leaders failed to do -- stood up to the religious right after the killing of Punjab governor Salman Taseer over his call for changes to the country's blasphemy laws.

One is Sherry Rehman, a politician from the ruling Pakistan People's Party, who first proposed amendments to the laws. The other is actress Veena Malik, who challenged the clerical establishment for criticising her for appearing on Indian reality show Big Boss.  I'm slightly uncomfortable about grouping the two together -- the fact that both are Pakistani women does not make them any more similar than say, for example, two Pakistani men living in Rawalpindi or  London. Yet at the same time, the idea that Pakistan can produce such different and outspoken women says a lot about the diversity and energy of a country which can be too easily written off as a failing state or  bastion of the Islamist religious right.

Sherry Rehman is living as a virtual prisoner in her home in Karachi after being threatened over her support for amendments to the blasphemy laws. She has refused to leave the country for her own safety, nor indeed to accept the position adopted by her party leaders -- that now is not the time to amend the laws. Their argument appears to be that trying to amend the laws now would just add more fuel to the fire after religious leaders defended Taseer's killing and organised huge protests in favour of the current legal provisions.

"There's never a right time," Britain's Guardian newspaper quoted her as saying.  "Blasphemy cases are continually popping up, more horror stories from the ground. How do you ignore them?" 

"We know from history that appeasement doesn't pay. It only emboldens them," said Rehman.

For background, here is the text of the original law introduced into the Indian Penal Code by British colonial rulers in 1860:

Section 295: Injuring or defiling place of worship, with intent to insult the religion of any class:

from Breakingviews:

Privacy is the Person of Last Year

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has been crowned Person of the Year by Time magazine. WikiLeaks boss Julian Assange, meanwhile, topped the associated reader poll. Uncommon levels of self-belief, and superior coding abilities, aren’t the only parallels between the two men. Both are leading the technological assault on privacy.

The two organizations have obvious differences in scale and intent. Facebook has more than 500 million users and is profitable. It aims to give people “the power to share.” WikiLeaks is a small non-profit that believes, among other things, in “the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices.”

But the two organizations share a devotion to the idea that society benefits when more is made public. Facebook’s personal information-sharing facilitates everything from keeping up with friends living overseas to finding fellow beekeepers in Bushwick. WikiLeaks, by contrast, explicitly encourages “leaks” of ethical, political and historical significance, including as it turns out state secrets, in the hope of reducing corruption and increasing political accountability.

Whether either Facebook or WikiLeaks will live up their leaders’ divergent, but comparably idealistic, hopes is questionable. Extra status updates can bring friends closer or just irritate, and personal data shared online can reveal more than is healthy. Likewise, making ambassadorial dispatches public can shine a disinfecting light on a government’s role in unsavory deals -- or hurt efforts to forestall damaging conflicts and put undercover agents in harm’s way.

Both organizations are gaining status and so are their leaders, as the Time selections attest. This may, however, be their golden hour. Technology has made it much harder to keep things hidden or to hush them up once exposed. But the costs of bringing formerly private things to light are likely to become increasingly evident. Even the relatively benign-seeming Mr. Zuckerberg, now in command of vast amounts of personal information, is likely to face calls for far greater accountability from Facebook's mass of users – if not regulators one day.

For his part, Mr. Assange has chosen to provoke governments and big companies. But both Facebook and WikiLeaks are in the vanguard of exploiting the Internet’s power to collect and broadcast once-confidential information. Whatever the constraints eventually imposed on either model, the genie is out of the bottle. Already, privacy is the person - or rather the casualty - of the past year.

First Direct CEO Matt Colebrook answers your questions

– Matt Colebrook is Chief Executive of online bank First Direct. The opinions expressed are his own. –

In an article on 21 September, Matt Colebrook discussed the role of social media in banking, arguing that social networks are key for customer service as they enable customers to use and interact with banks whenever they want and from wherever they may be.

Below are the questions filed in response to the article and Colebrook’s answers.

Question: As Matt rightly says customers want to access their bank when they want, but more than that they want to bank on their terms.

The quote ‘I see social media within the financial sector creating conversations’ – is a tell tale. It should be financial services as one small strand in social media. Banks need to stop thinking of themselves as so important, they must accept they are but one strand in the Y-Gen consciousness.

For financial institutions to be able to flow useful data and be part of the conversation, does Matt recognise that they have to make a mental leap in terms of security models? Release read only API’s, use open web standard like OAuth. Of course protect core assets and transactions, but let the data flow out, and see the value start to be added. Does Matt see that this shift is key to enabling the conversation? – DanMux

Answer: My comments around banks and social media were based on our looking at things from a consumer point of view. People talk about the things that affect their daily lives and of course finances are a part of that. Maybe creating conversations wasn’t the right way of phrasing it, but being there to engage in them – certainly. Our social media programme is all about trying to open up the bank so that our customers can engage with us in the way of their choosing. This was the essential innovation at the core of first direct from the outset, in fact the whole bank was founded on a blank piece of paper with the word “customer” right in the middle.

Matt Colebrook on the future of banking

– Matt Colebrook is Chief Executive of online bank First Direct. The opinions expressed are his own. –

The 21st birthday of First Direct is as good a time as any to look back on changes within the financial industry and how it will continue to evolve.

The mercurial growth of the social web is something banks just can’t ignore. We’re now in the age where both the individual and consumer are empowered with a voice that can reach far and wide in a short space of time.

However, most fundamentally, social media is advantageous as a facet of banking customer service. Financial institutions are now presented with the opportunity to become accessible and direct like never before. Social networks and the new generation of smartphones enable customers to use and interact with banks whenever they want and from wherever they may be.

Looking to the future I think the chance to listen, learn and engage better with consumers via the social web is something banks must take notice of. People will expect unparalled levels of accessibility and banks must be able to provide a regular flow of interactive and easily shareable information for anyone who wants to access it. This is where I see financial institutions adding value to their offering; focusing on customer care and service; using social media to make this accessibility effortless.

The social web gives both customers and non-customers a voice; a place where they can be heard both by brands and each other. For us in the banking industry it provides the perfect arena; we can see ‘gripes’ and ‘niggles’ and whether these are collective or individual they allow us to source discontent, which provides food for thought in how we can make things better.

Twitter Business Centre could expose firms to risk or reward

-Bob Barker is VP of Corporate Marketing and Digital Engagement at Alterian. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Twitter’s decision to launch a Business Centre is an extremely positive development for brands that want to move beyond a marketing strategy of mass broadcast and one-way conversations with their consumers.

Astute brand directors know the old approach simply isn’t working and that individuals are becoming increasingly used to interacting with content, rather than passively receiving messages.

However, Alterian’s latest report, “Your Brand: At Risk or Ready for Growth”, highlights that 60 percent of organisations do not have a social media strategy in place.

This report is not just another social media survey, it is a call for businesses to be more aware of a new generation of “conver-sumers”, and with this latest news from Twitter it could not be more timely.

The Twitter Business Centre takes brand communications to a new level by enabling more than one user to post content from the account and allowing direct messaging from users who are not being followed by the the brand.

TweetTracker shows Nick Clegg most liked

- Paul Afshar is senior account manager at public relations firm Edelman. The opinions expressed are his own. -

A famous German writer once said “personality is everything”, which could not ring truer for the UK’s General Election, and particularly “likeability” on social media.

With the public, to lesser and greater extents, unbothered by detail of party manifesto commitments, the sturdy Scottishness of Gordon Brown vs. the persuasive tones of David Cameron and, arguably Nick Clegg, act as barometers of voters’ intentions better than their understanding of National Insurance contributions.

Should the party leaders be concerned about their likeability on social media?

Yes, according to Edelman’s TweetTracker tool. On Twitter, with its 2.5 million UK users, personality is everything.

TweetTracker comprehensively assesses personality ratings of the three main party leaders – David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg – on Twitter, giving them an “approval/ disapproval” score, like those used in U.S. Presidential campaigns.

The battle for Twitter

- Paul Afshar is senior account manager at public relations firm Edelman. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Twitter claimed its first scalp in the Election campaign on Friday with the sacking of Labour candidate for Moray in Scotland, Stuart MacLennan, following a series of controversial tweets on the site.

Whether or not 140 characters will influence the election campaign is a moot point, but with 2.5 million UK users including the PM’s wife Sarah Brown and actor Stephen Fry, Twitter will no doubt have some influence on conversation around the campaign.

To track its impact, Edelman has used its Political TweetLevel tool to track and measure the influence, trust engagement and popularity of the top 150 politicians, bloggers, candidates and journalists, ranked by their influence, on Twitter during the campaign.

TweetLevel measures the influence of individuals on Twitter based on a number of factors (including re-tweets, followers, frequency of tweets, references etc measured by an algorithm).

But enough about the science and down to the findings.

The battle for influence on Twitter is decisively being won by Labour, a trick the party will no doubt want to emulate in the polls.  Labour politicians and candidates are greater in number and by influence in the top 150 with MP for West Bromwich East Tom Watson topping the ranking, beating even Downing Street and David Cameron.  Grant Shapps, the Shadow Housing Minister beats all other Conservative MPs for influence, closely followed by party favourite Eric Pickles.