Today is Human Rights Day, and we should reflect on the Internet. Why? While the mainstream media routinely ignore human rights stories, people across the world have been able to harness the Internet to tell important but underreported stories and launch successful human rights campaigns.

Human rights and advocacy organizations have used the Internet to drum up public support and action on human rights campaigns. The international human rights group Breakthrough has creatively used YouTube to educate people about the U.S.’s disastrous deportation system; thousands have viewed their video animation series, “Don’t Deport Me, Scotty.”

Amnesty International consistently uses the Internet to help everyday people act against stopping torture, preventing executions and protecting human rights defenders.

In response to the anti-gay ballot initiatives in California, Arizona, Florida and Arkansas, a massive “grassweb” effort dubbed “Day Without a Gay: Call in Gay,” was launched online. Then there’s the organization NothingButNets.net, which is asking the world to donate life-saving bed nets to help protect people from malaria in refugee camps with the click of a mouse.

Online Web sites and bloggers have stepped up to fill the gap left by the mainstream media’s failure to cover human rights abuses. Project Censored, which finds the top 25 stories that have gone underreported, ignored, misrepresented or censored by the U.S. corporate media, includes several stories about human rights abuses in its 2009 list. Many of the stories were published online. And when dozens of reporters were arrested during the Republican National Convention and the mainstream media turned a blind eye, the journalism project The UpTake was there, providing up-to-the-minute videos online.

All of this vital work is made possible by one guiding principle on the Internet: Net Neutrality. Anyone with a high-speed Internet connection and a computer can create content, send a letter of protest to a national leader, donate to a human rights organization, or launch their own campaign. Free from discrimination online, we’re also free to fight for the human rights struggles that speak to us, and to better the lives of the people we’ve been introduced to thanks to the power of the Internet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 2:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.-->