"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." George Bernard Shaw

April 3, 2011

DEMOCRACY IN DIGITAL INFLUENCE

2011

What is difficult about the concept of democracy is how to define and put it in both qualitative and quantitative measures. On the one hand, every society has a different historical background and continued process of adopting democratic grounds which makes democracy inevitably difficult to measure in an objective manner. On the other hand, in a quantitative manner, it is not very easy to measure democracy in numbers as there are several instruments of it. However, Davit Beetham, in some perspective, presents his readers a pattern of assessing a country’s democracy. In this paper, I will present his four step prototype in the issue of a recent digital censorship in Turkey which involves Digiturk and Blogger as main actors.

Two weeks ago, Digiturk, the leading TV operator which holds the Turkish Football League’s broadcasting rights, went to the courts to block the access to the Blogger (the leading blog provider in the world) users that illegally broadcast the football matches online . However, because of the technical difficulties and legal gaps related to digital spheres, the courts banned not only the illegal blogs, but all the blogs that use Blogger as a blog provider. So what really happened was censoring all the Blogger blogs, not only illegal or Turkish ones, in the digital world which also can be evaluated as a lack of democratic and civil rights.

To start with, Beetham draws four steps to assess a country’s democracy . First is to define the contents of the goods of that democracy which brings us to the digital sphere of freedom in the internet. I firmly believe that internet is a sphere of freedom and it can also be seen as a prototype of deliberative democracy. “Public justification is justification to each citizen as a result of free and reasoned debate among equals” writes Thomas Christiano . It is still a premature thought to accept digital world as a reasonable sphere but it gives me a great hope in some respect that it allows everyone to spit out their comments to others which is like nothing else compared to past. Digital sphere and social media have an enormous power to get people together and provide a common ground to them to express their thoughts. This is some kind of a civil right which allows anyone, that has an internet connection, to be a part of it.

“Second, we need to identify the relevant international standards of best practice for realizing each of these rights” says Beetham . In this part, I used the reports of an institution named Freedom House and its United Kingdom’s reports on the subject of internet freedom. As most of the people can accept, the UK is a reasonable example due to her long history of democracy and civil rights. In the report of Freedom House, internet freedom is very much guaranteed by the government in the UK which took a point of 20/100 (less is better) . Just to compare and contrast, Turkey took a point of 40 and defined as “partly free” due to her legal gaps in digital laws and habits and history of restrictive policies both in the constitution and the general public opinion . Blogger is not first world-wide popular website that was banned in Turkey as YouTube, Vimeo, Wordpress and Dailymotion also had a bite of the legal inconveniences. So, it is clear that, the UK, an example of mature democracy, sees internet as mostly a sphere of freedom where users have the rights to use the content without severe restrictions, unlike the situation in Turkey.

According to Beetham, third step is the possible subversions that can prevent democratic standards which brings us to the Digiturk-Blogger case. Digiturk’s attempt to ban the illegal broadcasting blogs can be seen reasonable due to the copyrights of purchased content but what they caused unintentionally was blocking access to all the blogosphere. This meant a serious harm to digital rights of bloggers and blog readers which created an obstacle against their digital freedom. In some way, the case of Digiturk’s attempt was resulted in that way mostly because of legal gaps and technical difficulties as the courts were not able to only ban the illegal web sites. So, the absolute result was a subversion in democratic standards.

The last step defined by Beetham was to show typical agencies that can be effective against possible subversions . In this case, our agency was an individual, an Assist. Prof. Dr. Yaman Akdeniz from Bilgi University who is very engaged in activities against digital censorship in Turkey. To lift the Blogger ban, he went to the court with relevant documents that prove the removal of illegal blogs. The courts also got help from an expert after Akdeniz’ proof, and lift the ban against Blogger . Although, it was a temporary treatment, Akdeniz’ individual attempt still played a great role to suppress the subversion of democratic rights of Turkish blogosphere. Now, a real agency that should take steps is the government and the courts alongside with digital experts to replace the old digital laws with new ones in order to prevent any possible future subversions in the digital freedom of internet users.

To conclude, in this paper, although it is more than difficult, I tried to put democracy in a qualitative and quantitative frameworks with a simple example from digital world. I used Beetham’s four step framework to assess a country’s democracy and a recent case of digital censorship that happened between Digiturk and Blogger. I firmly believe that internet and social media provides a new understanding of civil rights and although they are embedded in the virtual world, I hope for a transition of freedom habit and deliberative reason from virtual world of internet to the real world that we live in.

References:

Milliyet, read online, 2011: http://bit.ly/heOW2E
Beetham, David. “Freedom as the Foundation,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 15, No: 4, October 2004, pp. 65.
Christiano, Thomas, “Democracy,” in Issues in Political Theory, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 84.
Freedom House, read online, 2009: http://bit.ly/gtWCkm
Freedom House, read online, 2009: http://bit.ly/en75ho
Miliyet, read online, 2011: http://bit.ly/eQ96Sz

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