While you’re thinking that over, I would love to introduce you to Gaurav Mishra, the Yahoo! Human Rights Fellow in International Values, Communications, Technology and Global Internet at Georgetown University.

As the Yahoo! Human Rights Fellow, Gaurav leads research on social media and mobile use in India and China and teaches a graduate course on “Social Media in Business, Development and Government.” Gaurav is on sabbatical from India’s Tata Motors, where he is Assistant General Manager with a focus on digital marketing. He also writes Gauravonomics, a popular blog on how social media and mobile technologies are changing media, business, development and government, particularly in emerging economies.

Gaurav recently came to campus to speak about his research. Some highlights:

• Even where Internet content is controlled, creative people find ways to communicate. In China, Internet users resort to images and code words to elude censorship. For example, “harmonized” was a euphemism for “my blog got censored.” When the term was banned, intrepid writers wrote about “river crab,” which sounds similar to harmonious in Mandarin. Later the meme became photos of a naked man doing pushups.
• The Internet can be a powerful tool to support free expression and social change. In India, four young women used the Internet to launch the “Pink Chaddi Campaign,” a peaceful protest against violent conservatives’ plans to disrupt Valentine’s Day by assaulting “pub-going, loose and forward” women. The campaign called for women to shame the would-be perpetrators by sending pink panties to their homes and offices. The overwhelming response resulted in more than 270 blog links; a Facebook group with more than 48,000 members, 350 discussion topics and more than 6,750 wall posts; and hundreds of pink panties sent. The campaign brought worldwide attention to the issue, mobilized thousands of young women, and the group threatening the violent action was preventively detained on Valentine’s Day.

Gaurav’s talk was particularly timely, as Yahoo! continues to explore how we promote free expression for our users around the world. Yahoo!’s Business & Human Rights Program will be hosting a Business & Human Rights Summit in Sunnyvale on May 5 (space is limited; RSVP required). The Summit will focus on how technology and the Internet facilitate freedom of expression, with a focus upon innovative approaches to addressing government challenges. Our keynote speaker is Ory Okolloh, the Exective Director of Ushahidi, the crowdsourcing platform for crisis situations developed in Kenya and used in the Congo, Gaza and the 2009 elections in India. We’ll have panels about citizen and cyber journalism (featuring journalists/bloggers from around the world) and about the Global Network Initiative, a global effort co-founded by Yahoo! to address threats to privacy and free expression in the Internet, communications and technology sector.

So… now that you know that even a pair of underwear can be a powerful tool for social change, what’s your big idea?

Here’s my interview with Gaurav from his recent visit:

Ebele Okobi-Harris
Director, Yahoo! Business & Human Rights

The Internet – and Yahoo! – has a growing presence in Vietnam. By next year, thirty-five percent of the population is expected to get online – staggering when you consider Vietnam didn’t substantially embrace the Web until 2005. We entered the market a year later with a Vietnamese-language version of our homepage (vn.yahoo.com), followed by Mail, Messenger, Search, and News. We now run one of the country’s leading blogging services. And since few people own computers, we’re working with the Internet café industry through our iCafe program to improve the Internet experience for all involved.

Unfortunately, like other regions where communications are controlled, Vietnam is exploring ways to place restrictions on the Internet. The government recently issued regulations on Internet blogging that aim to limit certain online content, particularly posts considered more political in nature. Not surprisingly, these rules have been roundly criticized as an attempt to stifle internationally recognized speech. As a company committed to user safety and trust, we’ll continue to review these and any new rules to determine what effect, if any at all, they would have on our own policies.

We’ve learned tough lessons as pioneers in the emerging markets, and we’re now applying them to how we build businesses in new markets. In the case of Vietnam, we took deliberate steps when launching services there to protect our users. Our business, policy and legal advisors visited the country to assess the landscape as part of our human rights impact assessment – a process we committed to when we created Yahoo!’s Business & Human Rights Program last year. It helped us tailor our business to be consistent with our corporate human rights commitments. For example, we decided to manage and operate Yahoo!’s Vietnamese language services out of Singapore so the services would be governed by laws with stronger protections than in Vietnam today. We’re also providing further protections for our users and employees through legal structures, internal policies, user terms of service, and tailored approaches on data access and location.

We believe deeply in engagement in markets like Vietnam. It’s good business. It’s also empowering for local citizens, as they communicate, exchange ideas, and learn about the outside world in unprecedented ways. The online community is thriving in Vietnam, and we’re in a leadership position in that important and growing market. We’re proud of the business Yahoo! has built there and while we know we’ll face evolving challenges, we’re also confident in the approach we’re pursuing to protect the online rights of our users.

Doing business globally is challenging in any industry. Given the speed, scale, and dynamism of the Internet, our industry has some unique challenges. Some of those same issues in the emerging markets are also opportunities to spread enormously empowering information and communications tools and platforms to citizens hungry for access and openness. We’re a company founded on the principles of openness and user trust, and we’re not alone in our commitment to protecting and promoting these rights. We’re confident our partnership with companies, human rights groups, academics, and investors in the Global Network Initiative offers a powerful platform for collective action to promote freedom of expression and privacy online around the world, including in promising places like Vietnam.

You can read more about our global human rights initiatives here.

Michael Samway
VP & Deputy General Counsel

Photo from janello

These principles provide a valuable roadmap for companies like Yahoo! operating in markets where freedom of expression and privacy are unfairly restricted. The code also requires that participating companies make a number of commitments (with independent accountability), including among others:

• Conducting human rights impact assessments to identify circumstances where freedom of expression and privacy may be jeopardized an advanced.
• Training employees on procedures to protect freedom of expression and privacy when faced with unfair government demands and restrictions.
• Being transparent with users when required by governments to remove content or limit access to information and ideas as well as circumstances where disclosure of personal information may be required.
• Considering challenging governments in court or other forums when faced with restrictions that appear inconsistent with domestic and international laws and standards.
• Engaging in individual and collective policy advocacy for change in places where laws or practices don’t adequately protect citizens’ rights to freedom of expression and privacy.

Does this mean repressive regimes will stop censoring content or demanding information on their own citizens? No. But, we think this initiative will eventually make it more difficult for them to do so, with companies and human rights advocates united against unreasonable and unlawful demands.

Despite the two years of arduous work among companies, human rights groups, academics, investors, and policy advocates, launching the Global Network Initiative is in many ways just the start. We expect the initiative to evolve, and we hope these standards will take root and grow into global guidelines for even more companies worldwide. All the participants in the initiative are acutely aware of today’s online challenges and we believe we’ve created a framework for addressing the trends we see for tomorrow.

The Internet is transformative. We’ve seen it empower individuals, modernize economies, improve healthcare, strengthen education and raise awareness of local, national, and international events. Today, at the start of this next phase of our collective journey in the field of business and human rights, we strive to ensure technology remains a force for good for citizens around the world. You can read more about all of our human rights efforts here.

Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo

A few weeks ago, we received a letter from Senators Durbin and Tom Coburn (R – Okla.), asking for a further update on where Yahoo! and others were in developing the code of conduct. They urged companies not to wait until the code was finalized before taking action to safeguard user privacy and freedom of expression, something we’ve been deeply committed to at Yahoo!. As we said at the hearing, we’re ready now and we’ve been working to match our actions with our words.

You can read our response to the senators here, but let me recap a few key points:

• After 18 months of intensive effort to develop a global code, we’ve reached a major step with industry counterparts, human rights advocates, academics, investors, and others. We’ve all agreed to the core components of the code, which consist of principles of freedom of expression and privacy, implementation guidelines, and a governance, accountability and learning framework. Now it’s a matter of each participant reviewing the agreement for final approval. Again, we’re ready at Yahoo! to make this initiative a reality.
• We are optimistic we will collectively launch the initiative this Fall.
• Yahoo! hasn’t been waiting for a final code to take multiple actions on the human rights front. In addition to appealing to the State Department for their support in diplomatic efforts, we have:
  1. Established a human rights fund to assist political dissidents and their families;
  2. Implemented a human rights assessment as we explore doing business challenging markets and established a dedicated business and human rights program within the company; and
  3. Founded academic fellowships at Stanford and Georgetown to advance free expression and global values.

A year and a half may seem like a long time for those tapping their feet in anticipation of an industry code of conduct. We understand. We also believe it’s important to recognize the complexity of this dynamic process. We didn’t want to draft a pledge we’d all simply sign and move on. We needed to craft something meaningful that left everyone independently accountable to their pledge to do the right thing around free expression and privacy. We also faced the natural challenges drafting principles and guidelines for businesses where the industry and technology landscape regularly and often dramatically changes and evolves. We also agreed — companies and human rights groups alike — that we needed to include room for new participants, technologies, and challenges.

We’ve all also worked carefully in crafting the principles, implementation guidelines, and accountability and learning framework to be sure this isn’t a code pointing at or strictly about China. This is much broader, as it should be. We are in agreement across companies and human rights organizations that this initiative will be global in scope. We’re also hopeful inside and outside Yahoo! that this collective human rights code of conduct will be a model initiative showing the strength of collaboration in the field of business and human rights.

Michael Samway
VP & Deputy General Counsel

I tried to convey this simple message: We believe in the power of information and in global engagement, we were an industry pioneer in international markets, we take responsibility for our actions, we’ve learned valuable lessons, and we’re taking concrete steps on our own and collectively to be leaders in the field of business and human rights. You can read my testimony here.

The following day, I presented at the U.S. Department of State on a panel on Business & Human Rights. Sitting next to three other global companies in entirely different industries, I emphasized our commitment at Yahoo! to the principles of free expression and privacy and to working collectively with technology companies and others to create industry standards to guide companies in the world’s most challenging markets. I also discussed our collaboration with the State Department through its Global Internet Freedom Taskforce and our other efforts, including Jerry’s letter earlier this year to Secretary Rice.

At the Senate hearing, Senator Tom Coburn used an expression we’ve often heard and used at Yahoo!: Information is power. We continue to believe in that simple axiom. Information is empowering to ordinary citizens across the globe. Yahoo! is built on the power of information, and we’ll continue to harness that power for good.

Michael Samway
VP & Deputy General Counsel