Written by Tehneyat Waseem

Ok, so I’m one of those people who loves everything that moves, shakes, changes on the internet, the good stuff, the bad stuff that eventually leads to groundbreaking stuff. I absolutely love it. Why? Well because it changes things when things become too stuffy, boring, dull or just old routine.

Social media is crucial to the longevity of this generation growing up using the internet as a vital part of their way of interacting and communicating one on one with the rest of the world. Some people, such as Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, use social media to raise awareness raising by using their popularity on Twitter to fight hunger . Target uses their facebook profile to bring attention to their charity give-away, inlcuding their customers in deciding who the reciepient of the money should be. Governments on the other hand, are a completely different story when it comes to politics.

China asked Google to remove all pornographic content so the Chinese version of Google would not be able to find it -google.cn- (among other things being: Burma, Amnesty International, Human Rights, Falun Gong etc etc etc, the list goes on). Google, respectfully obliged (source mashable). And I find asking myself whether social interaction is to any benefit of governments at all when it goes against their state’s personal affairs and interests? Governments stepping in and constricting and controlling the use of internet of course has a lot to do with politics and especially with regards to international relations. Funny to think that people in China will not have access to, nor read what is written here, or elsewhere, about them. Not funny ha ha funny. But just funny.

It is no surprise that China, one of the largest human rights violators, has and still makes efforts to make their population voiceless, by taking away their freedom to search for information, and by limiting their use of and access to the world wide web – the internet- the forum in which we voice our opinions. It just really surprises me when other countries chose to follow suit and build censorship as an integral part of the internet identity of users in the respective countries, such as Iran. Recently the Iranian government has, due to the heavy demonstrations taking place, as I write and as you read, limited the access to the internet for its population, and has limited the information leaving the country.

A day ago, some of my friends’ status on facebook was “if anyone is on Twitter, set your location to Tehran and your time one to GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches. The more people at this location, the more of logjam it creates for forces trying to shut Iranians’ access to the internet down. Cut and paste and pass it on”. And this is what I love. Solidarity between our generation. The understanding of one anothers suffering. How people join and stand together for a good cause. Perhaps adding to small changes in the social media world, but on a longer term adding to the truely groundbreaking stuff. I remain hopeful that perhaps pressure will be put on Google by internet users from the Western part of the world, and maybe if that happens, we can see what step Google would make towards China and Iran…losing two big clients or losing the internet using public? Maybe it is all just potato patato for them.

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Tags: Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Facebook, Google, Google china, Human rights, Iran, Social media Iran, Twitter